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
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
By Seth Garth
[Usually music critic
Seth Garth confines himself to reviews of CDs and other related subjects like
the history behind various musical genre but today he has asked for space to
speak about poetry or rather the effect that a poem, 17th century
poet John Donne’s Death, Be Not Proud,
has had on his old schoolboy friend Luther Larsen who is going through some
tough times these days. He begs your indulgence. Ben Goldman]
My schoolboy friend from
old Riverdale High Luther Larsen is dying. I cannot put the matter anymore
gently. Luther Larsen is dying. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but his
ticket has been punched. He is a “dead
man walking” to use a term from death penalty cases as he himself put it to me
the other night on the cellphone when he called me from Boston where he is
stating for a few days and where he has of late been a patient at Massachusetts
General Hospital. Early last year after complaining for several months of
serious bladder problems (let’s just leave it at seriously increased urgency
and frequency problems and the reader can figure it out from there on the
ravages of a seventy-five year old man) and seeking various treatments that did
not relieve his condition one biopsy taken to see what the real problem was he
was informed by the doctor that he had bladder cancer.
After the initial shock,
no, denial had worn off (he did not tell me about his condition for several
months after the diagnosis) Luther began what are called BCG treatments, not
the dreaded chemotherapy he was at pains to tell me and others whenever anybody
made that mistake about the nature of the procedure. I will not go into the graphic aspects of the
procedure but they included a series of treatments projected to be over a two
plus year duration in order to control the spread of cancerous cells by
throwing a toxic cocktail into his body to “harden” up the walls of the
bladder. His urologist touted the procedure as a very successful way to control
the disease. Luther was all in even though he hated the periodic procedure days
like the plague for it left him depleted and very tired although the actual
procedure time was fairly short the life-cycle of the chemicals was not.
Luther went through the
first couple of series with flying colors after he was “scoped,” after the
doctor did another procedure to see what his bladder looked like and after he got
the results of a urine sample back. Then after the last series and “scope” the
other shoe dropped. The urologist informed him that his bladder was inflamed
again, the cancerous cells were making a comeback. The problem, the ‘dead man
walking” problem, remember that is Luther’s term not mine, is that due to other
medical problems including prostate issues he was not a candidate for a bladder
replacement, the next step if the BCG procedure was unsuccessful in holding back the cancerous cells. Meaning,
according to the doctor, that while they would continue the periodic BCGs that
realistically he had only a couple of years before he would be overcome by the
cancer. Would be a “dead man dead” as Luther put it in one of his more sardonic
moments.
Luther’s initial
reaction to the news from the doctor once he returned from Boston to the apartment
that he was renting in a small fishing village in Maine was denial and fear,
not uncommon among people who have gotten this kind of terminal notice. (The
“why” of the apartment in a small Maine fishing village for a man who has all
his life feared to be more than a mile from city street lights will be dealt
with in a minute.). He became reclusive, a condition made worse by the
isolation and emptiness of that small Maine fishing village in winter until
that other night when he told me his fate (again it had been a month after the
doctor’s bad news before he made that call to me to tell me about his
condition).
But enough of the sad
medical prognostication because if you have been playing attention the topic is
about John Donne’s poem Death, Be Not Proud
which is really what Luther wanted to talk about for the hour and one half that
we were on the phone (he, self-admittedly, not much of a phone person so you
can get the tenor of his concerns). Luther had ever since we met in English
class freshman year at old Riverdale High been mad for poetry, would read poems
out loud even when we were hanging around pizza parlor corners on windswept and
girl-less Friday nights much to our annoyance and to our prospects for “picking
up” stray girls who were guy-less and knew that the pizza parlor was the “spot”
to meet and see what happened. In those days I was trying to get all the guys
interested in the folk minute that was brewing in the land and which I had
heard girls, the kind of girls I, we, would be interested in were getting into
so I was not really paying attention to what Luther was spouting forth as far
as poetry went. The one poem I was crazy about mad man Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Luther, to use an expression that
made the pizza parlor rounds, could have given a rat’s ass about.
The exception to my
disinterest in Luther’s foolish poems was John Donne’s Death, Be Not Proud which Luther lived by, still does which will
come again in a minute as well and then mainly on religious grounds. See Luther
was brought up a Protestant, a Lutheran and hence his name, who were not as
hung about getting to heaven as I as a Roman Catholic devotee was then. Luther
always said, now remember he was only maybe fifteen or sixteen at the time and
not any more worried about the grim reaper than I was, that he would not worry
about dying, would face it as bravely as he could when his time came. Saw death
not as an enemy but as just the “big sleep” (my term from that last paragraph
of Raymond Chandler’s crime novel The Big
Sleep), no better or worse. He had picked up that idea from Donne’s poem
and anytime we talked of the subject that would always come up. I then, and now too, feared death, feared not
being, feared losing the battle, feared winding up outside the gates of Eden.
The other night Luther quoted for the first time in a long time that poem and
said that he was still resolved as he had been as a schoolboy when the matter
was not quite so pressing to face his impending death as bravely as he could.
He made short work of the few feeble arguments I made to carry on until the
bitter end.
Then, as his voice
became noticeably less audible over that damn phone, Luther kind of whispered
what did bother him, was agitating him in the light of his recent news. He had
begun to become afraid that at the end he would die alone, alone with nobody to
see him through at the end. Now of course I and a bunch of other guys will be
there when that hopefully faraway day comes but you have to know Riverdale
schoolboy “speak” to know what Luther really meant. He meant that there would
be no female companion to see him off. I knew exactly what he meant because
poetry –addled or music-addled we were, are, skirt-addled. And that brings us
back to that point about why he was tucked away in some godforsaken small
isolated Maine fishing village in winter. A couple of years ago his long-time
companion, Stephanie, Stephanie Murphy, told Luther she had found another man,
had found somebody more in tune with her musical and artistic interests than he
and that she was leaving him and the home they had shared for the previous ten
years (Luther had been twice divorced, not nice divorces before meeting
Stephanie). Once she left, once she left even knowing that he had serious
health issues, Luther could not face staying in their place and took off for
Maine which in sunnier times had been a place of refuge for both of them. And
there he has stayed although recently he has made noises about going back to
his roots, going back to Riverdale to face the end in a place that he knew
would provide some mental relief.
As we finished that long conversation Luther
signed off by reaffirming that he was not afraid to die, and was hopeful that
maybe he could find someone (remember read some woman) who would be there for
him at the end. I give a rat’s ass about
that and I told him I hope that he does find somebody. Enough said.
The Nat Turner Rebellion and the Fight Against Slavery
Part One
We print below, edited for publication, the first part of a presentation given by Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee member Alan Wilde to the New York Spartacus Youth Club on January 28.
In 1831, American slaveowners learned what it means to have the fear of God put into them. In August of that year, an insurrection was launched by rebel slaves led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia. Before their suppression, the rebels killed up to 60 whites in the course of a few days—the highest number to die in a slave uprising in the U.S. It was the unmistakable justice and vengeance of revolutionary terror. And it was met with the reactionary terror of the slaveowners, who crushed the rebellion and drowned it in blood. We honor Nat Turner’s rebellion, as we honor John Brown’s 1859 Harpers Ferry raid. These were blows struck in the cause of black freedom and heralded the Civil War that finally smashed the slave order and emancipated the slave.
Truth be told, while the rebellion and its aftermath are well documented, including through newspaper articles at the time, we know little about Nat Turner himself. As brilliant as he was, he was a black slave living in the South. As such, no one was going to document his life. What little documentation exists of Nat’s life consists mainly of the record of him being bought and sold. As Thomas Wentworth Higginson—a radical abolitionist and the commander of the first regiment of freed slaves to fight in the Civil War—wrote in an August 1861 Atlantic article, “Nat Turner’s Insurrection”: “The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized; they belong to the class.” Speaking of Nat Turner, Higginson noted that he “did not even possess a name, beyond one abrupt monosyllable,—for even the name of Turner was the master’s property.”
Many of the books and articles that address Nat’s life before the rebellion base themselves on Thomas R. Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, VA (1831). Gray, a Southern lawyer and ardent defender of slavery, supposedly sat down with Nat after his capture and took down his “confession” verbatim. Many historians cast doubt on Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner for an obvious reason: Does one really believe that this slaveowning lawyer took down the words of Nat Turner precisely, without inventions or omissions? At the same time, “When the document is viewed in historical context,” as noted by Stephen B. Oates in The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (1975), “the confessions seem an authentic and reliable document.” Oates writes that the confessions are “very close” to Turner’s statements in his October 31 court interrogation, and the details correspond to the slave trial records and contemporary newspaper accounts. (A very useful website, www.natturnerproject.org, has collected and collated the available documentary record of Turner’s rebellion and its aftermath.) So, with all these caveats, I will refer to Gray’s Confessions, as well as other works, in this talk.
Nat Turner was born in October 1800—incidentally, the same year of Gabriel Prosser’s planned slave rebellion and the same year Denmark Vesey won his freedom. His father is believed to have escaped slavery when Nat was a young boy. His mother, Nancy, seems interesting. One story has it that she was brought to the U.S. through the harrowing Middle Passage directly from Africa; another that she was sold to the Turner family by a slaveowner escaping the Revolution in Saint-Domingue, what is now Haiti. Whatever the reality, the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, the world’s first and only successful slave revolution, loomed very large over the Americas. How much of it was known to Nat Turner personally, I do not know. But it was well known among slaves and certainly among the slave masters, who dreaded and feared its implications for America’s “peculiar institution.”
As a youth, Nat Turner learned to read and write. Oates credits this not only to his deep intelligence, but also to his Methodist owners who “not only approved of Nat’s literacy but encouraged him to study the Bible.” In Gray’s Confessions, Nat is quoted as saying that his intelligence meant that “I would never be of any service to any one as a slave.”
Slavery is by definition an unimaginably brutal and deeply degrading institution that denies people their humanity. In North America, along with the genocidal annihilation of the indigenous population, slavery provided the basis for the primitive accumulation of capital. Slavery was not an incidental outgrowth of American capitalism. It was a fundamental component of its birth and development, and its legacy continues to define American capitalism more than 150 years after the destruction of the slave system. American society is still shaped by this history through the continuing oppression of black people as a race-color caste, integrated into the working class while, in their majority forcibly segregated at the bottom of society.
We do not know much about Nat Turner’s family life. It is widely believed that in the early 1820s, he became involved with a young woman at the Turner farm named Cherry, and at some point they were married. To be clear, slave marriages, which were usually marked by the couple jumping over a broomstick together, had no legality. One of the crimes inflicted upon black people in the South was the separation of families, with wives, husbands, mothers and children sold to different owners. One of the biggest fears was to be sold to one of the notoriously brutal, huge cotton plantations of the Deep South. As Oates notes, “For Virginia slaves, accustomed to a modicum of family life, Georgia seemed a living hell.”
Nat and Cherry faced that prospect in 1822 when Samuel Turner—their owner—died. While they were not sold to the Deep South, they were each sold to different owners: Nat to Thomas Moore and Cherry to Giles Reese, whose plantation was a few miles away. They could see each other from time to time, but they were separated. Higginson powerfully captured the horror of this reality in his Atlantic piece:
“This is equivalent to saying that by day or by night that husband had no more power to protect her than the man who lies bound upon a plundered vessel’s deck has power to protect his wife on board the pirate-schooner disappearing in the horizon; she may be reverenced, she may be outraged; it is in the powerlessness that the agony lies.”
Newspaper accounts of the time reported something else about Cherry: Following Nat’s execution, she was lashed and tortured to produce papers he had entrusted to her, after which both she and their daughter were sold to slave traders.
The Religion of the Slave
In his piece, Higginson notes that Nat Turner saw himself, and was seen by his fellow slaves, as a prophet. He was not, as he is usually depicted, a preacher—for example, in last year’s film by Nate Parker, The Birth of a Nation. There is no question that Nat was a deeply religious man, and his fervor found expression in messianic visions.
The religion of the slave was a contradictory phenomenon. It was not simply a reflection of white Christianity, but a unique, dynamic creation of black people on the terrain of American slavery. It preached endurance and patience as a way to survive the inhumanity of slavery, but also the idea that deliverance would one day come. It acted as a brake on the insurrectionary instinct of the slave, while at the same time being unable to fully extinguish the striving for freedom inherent in a people held in chains.
For slaves, gatherings for religious services were not only of religious significance; they were often political and social events. Indeed, for many generations, the church was the only allowed form of black social organization. Historically, even during periods of militant struggle, many black people remained tied to the church. It is significant that nearly every important black mass leader has been deeply religious or church-centered. But while the church has long been among the most pervasive organizers of the black masses, the religious beliefs of Nat Turner are hardly comparable to the reactionary godliness of today’s black clergy. For a long time, the role of black church leaders has been to channel the anger and frustration of the black masses back into prayer meetings and more schemes to reform racist U.S. capitalism, usually through the Democratic Party.
Nat Turner’s religion was based on a desire to drown the slave system in blood. His God was the Old Testament God of vengeance and retribution. For slaves, the story of Exodus, where Moses leads the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, symbolized not only freedom but also divine punishment for the wrongdoers through the plagues. Nat Turner captures this spirit in a passage attributed to him in Thomas Gray’s Confessions: “And now the Holy Ghost had revealed itself to me, and made plain the miracles it had shown me—For as the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth, and had ascended to heaven for the salvation of sinners…it was plain to me that the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and the great day of judgment was at hand.” Nat Turner’s rebellion was judgment day.
The Rebellion
Nat’s rebellion brought to life the worst nightmares of the slave-master class, revealing the inherently barbaric nature of slavery. For many months to follow, any rumor of a slave uprising sent the white masters and their families fleeing from their homes.
The rebellion was not begun because of a particular incident or a particular horror Nat faced or witnessed as a slave. Rather, as Higginson writes, “Whatever Nat Turner’s experiences of slavery might have been, it is certain that his plans were not suddenly adopted, but that he had brooded over them for years.”
In February 1831, there was a solar eclipse, and Nat saw this as a sign. He managed to gather some muskets and set the date of insurrection for July 4, a day whose symbolism is obvious. But he was forced to postpone after he fell ill. On August 13, there was an atmospheric disturbance that apparently made the sun appear bluish-green. Turner took this as his final sign. He brought together his handful of confidants, no more than six: Henry, Hark, Nelson, Sam, Will and Jack. They deliberated for eleven hours. Higginson described that “two things were at last decided: to begin their work that night, and to begin it with a massacre so swift and irresistible as to create in a few days more terror than many battles, and so spare the need of future bloodshed.”
The rebellion began on August 22. The plan was that the seven of them would go out from plantation to plantation, kill all the whites they could find regardless of age or sex, recruit all the slaves they could to their rebel army and gather guns, muskets and other weapons for a drawn-out fight. It was a matter of military necessity not to leave any of the slaveowners or their families alive to sound the alarm. The first house they went to was that of Joseph Travis, who had been Nat’s owner since 1830. The rebels, not wanting to reveal themselves too early, decided not to use muskets until they had gathered sufficient forces. They went to the bedroom where the master and his wife slept. Bringing down his axe, Nat struck the first blow against Travis, but it was dark and his aim was poor. Will had to complete the job and then kill the wife. After that, they moved on to the children, including a baby in its cradle that they had initially forgotten to kill.
I want to underline that this was not random, maniacal terror. It was part of an organized plan. For example, the rebels made a point of not attacking any farms owned by poor whites. As Higginson noted, “There was no gratuitous outrage beyond the death-blow itself.” This was not a war of blacks against whites, but of the enslaved against the enslavers. The slaves were property and all claims of ownership had to be destroyed. If left alive, that baby in its cradle could one day grow up and say: That slave is my property. Even the Richmond Enquirer at the time admitted that “indiscriminate massacre was not their intention, after they obtained foothold, and was resorted to in the first instance to strike terror and alarm. Women and children would afterwards have been spared, and men also who ceased to resist.”
This was a rebellion against the institution of slavery. In Gray’s Confessions, Nat Turner describes his owner at the time, Travis, by saying that he “was to me a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment to me.” This underlines that the issue was not the cruelties of a particular slave master, but the system of slavery itself.
As they moved from plantation to plantation, the rebels’ forces swelled to about 70 fighters. Within about 48 hours, some 60 whites were killed without the loss of a single slave. Nat Turner then decided it was time to strike at the Southampton County seat, Jerusalem, and to raid its armory. The plan was to then retreat into the Dismal Swamp. There, the former slaves would have a defended position from which they could further recruit and launch attacks against the slaveowners. Higginson thinks the attack on Jerusalem could have succeeded if only Turner had not made the mistake of waiting too long outside the Parker plantation, three miles from the town. Some of Turner’s men wanted to stop there to recruit more slaves for the rebel army. Nat was hesitant, worried that it would take too long and that the slaveowners’ militias would surely by now be on the move. But he relented.
A small white militia encountered the rebels outside the plantation, confirming Turner’s fears. They fired a volley and the former slaves fired back, dispersing the white militia, which would have been crushed had it not been able to hook up with another militia from Jerusalem. The rebels were forced into an orderly retreat but were able to regroup their forces. The next day, however, they were defeated by a white militia that was twice their size and reinforced by three companies of artillery. The few remaining rebels agreed to split up and try to recruit more slaves to their army. They never reunited. Most were captured; bloody reprisal fell upon them.
Reaction
The fighting in the rebellion may have been local, but the impact of Nat Turner’s insurrection resounded throughout the South. The white militia that defeated Turner’s band was reinforced the next day by detachments from the USS Natchez and USS Warren, which were anchored at Norfolk, and by militias from counties in Virginia and North Carolina. There were rumors spreading that slave rebellions were erupting everywhere, including in the majority-black city of Wilmington, North Carolina.
The State of Virginia tried and sentenced to death 56 black people after the rebellion, reimbursing slave masters for their executed “property.” In the hysterical atmosphere that followed the uprising, white mobs and militias scoured the countryside, killing black people with impunity. At least 200 blacks were killed after the crushing of the rebellion. In one particularly gruesome massacre, a company of militia from North Carolina killed 40 black people in one day. Those accused of participating in the uprising were beheaded, and their heads mounted on poles at crossroads to terrify slaves. To this day, part of Virginia State Route 658 is labeled “Blackhead Signpost Road” as a commemoration of this racist bloodbath.
The legal response to the uprising was likewise furious. Virginia and other slave states passed laws that made it illegal to teach not only slaves but also free blacks to read and write. Other laws greatly restricted the few remaining rights that free black men and women had in the South. These included the right to assemble and to bear arms. One of the laws passed restricted all black people—slave or free—from holding religious meetings without the presence of a white minister.
As for Nat Turner himself, he evaded capture until he was found by a white farmer two months later. The farmer reported that Nat handed over his sword to him like a captured soldier surrendering his weapon. But needless to say, the slaveowners did not consider Nat a prisoner of war. On November 5, he was tried for “conspiring to rebel and making insurrection.” He was duly convicted and sentenced to death. When asked by Thomas Gray if he regretted his action now that he was about to die, Turner defiantly responded, “Was not Christ crucified.” He was hanged on November 11 in Jerusalem, Virginia. His corpse was flayed, beheaded and quartered.
Impact
Nat Turner stands in the courageous tradition of freedom fighters like Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey. Gabriel was a literate, enslaved blacksmith who planned a rebellion in the Richmond area in 1800. He was keenly aware of his environment, including the increasing tensions between the U.S. and France at the time; he thought a slave uprising in the U.S. could possibly get French aid. He was inspired by the French and Haitian revolutions. His intent was to lead a slave army into Richmond, but he was betrayed and captured. He, his two brothers and 23 other black men were hanged.
Denmark Vesey was born a slave in St. Thomas, a Caribbean island belonging to Denmark at the time. His slave master was a sea captain who took him to many countries, including Haiti. In late 1799, Denmark Vesey won a lottery in South Carolina and bought his freedom the following year for $600. A highly literate and sophisticated man who spoke multiple languages, he began working as a carpenter and set up his own successful business after gaining his freedom. But he was never able to win his first wife’s freedom, as her owner refused to sell her, meaning that all his children would be held in bondage.
In 1818 he was also among the founders of a congregation of what was known as the “Bethel circuit” of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the U.S. The church was destroyed by state authorities in 1822 after Vesey’s execution. After the Civil War, it was rebuilt in 1865 by, among others, Vesey’s son. It was no accident that the white-supremacist murderer Dylann Roof picked that church as the site of his massacre of nine black people in June 2015.
Vesey was intent on leading a war against slavery. In 1819, he was closely following Congressional debates on the status of Missouri, which seemed to put slavery on the defensive. He began plans for a revolt with a close circle of friends, which quickly drew in growing numbers. He used his position as a lay preacher to discuss insurrection plans during religious classes. He set the original date for the rebellion for 14 July 1822, Bastille Day, which marks the launch of the French Revolution. But he was betrayed and captured. Vesey and five others were convicted and sentenced to death; he was hanged on July 2. Soon afterward, another 30 black people were also executed.
These planned uprisings terrified the slaveowning class, whose system was based on open violence; in turn, Gabriel and Denmark Vesey understood that nothing but all-out war—i.e., violence—would bring that system down. That’s the context that Nat Turner’s rebellion must be seen in. His insurrection was the coming to life of Gabriel Prosser’s and Denmark Vesey’s plans. His cry was not only for his freedom, but for war against slavery. His impact extended far beyond those all-too-brief 48 hours.
A particular target of Virginia’s and other Southern politicians following Nat Turner’s rebellion was the abolitionist movement, which was blamed for “inspiring” the uprising. A “Vigilance Association” in Columbia, South Carolina, offered a $1,500 reward for the capture of any agitator convicted of distributing abolitionist literature, while North Carolina and Georgia put a bounty of $5,000 on the head of the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison. At the same time, Nat Turner’s rebellion forced increasing rifts within the abolitionist movement. Would they defend the slave rebels’ violence? Garrison, a committed pacifist, declared that he was “horror-struck” by the insurrection. On the other hand, Higginson described Nat Turner’s rebellion as “a symbol of retribution triumphant.”
Within the South, the years after the uprising saw a greater drive to defend slavery. The slaveowning states saw any criticism of slavery as an intrusion on their “way of life.” Among the most vocal in that regard was John C. Calhoun, U.S. vice president at the time and later the Senator from South Carolina. Whereas previous politicians such as Thomas Jefferson described slavery as a “necessary evil,” Calhoun praised it as a “positive good.” He denounced the language of the Declaration of Independence—that all men were created equal—as “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” He was an ardent supporter of nullification—the right of states to not enforce federal laws they dispute—and “states’ rights,” which were the watchwords of slavery and continue to be watchwords of racist reaction.
Above all, Nat Turner’s uprising was a precursor of the Civil War. We often make the point that John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid, which was aimed at sparking a general slave rebellion, was really the first shot of the Civil War. It was. By that same token, Nat Turner’s rebellion was the “First War”—as many former slaves in Southeastern Virginia had put it—that laid the groundwork for the coming war of liberation.
When Old Pete Ruled The House-With Banjo Man Pete Seeger In Mind
CD Review
By Zack James
Pete Seeger: headlines, footnotes and-a collection of topical songs, Pete Seeger, Smithsonian/Folkways, 1999
“You know you are wrong Seth about that first time we heard folk music, Woody Guthrie folk music in Mr. Lawrence’s music class back in seventh grade at old Jeramiah Holton Junior High,” Phil Larkin told one Seth Garth former old time music critic for the now long gone The Eye. Paid music critic a not unimportant point back in the day when alternative newspapers like The Eye survived and flopped on the sweat of unpaid unrequited volunteer labor and today too when the social media are flooded with citizen critics by the barrelful and everybody claims some expertise. Paid or not though Seth had called up Phil to verify what his fellow folk aficionado back in the early 1960s folk minute as he called it Jack Callahan and more recently drinking partner at the Erie Grille had told him when he had called upon Jack to refresh his memory about the first time he/they had heard a Woody Guthrie song. Jack had told Seth about the time that Mr. Lawrence had tried to unsuccessfully ween the class away from their undying devotion to the jail-break rock and roll music that was sweeping up youth nation just then. Seth had accepted what Jack said because he was after all a fellow aficionado, even if Seth had had to shoehorn him into the genre at the beginning and because he knew that Jack would not spread word around that Seth was not totally on top of every bit of arcane folk music lore around. Had had a senior moment if the truth were known.
So it was a reputation thing Seth was worried about even these many years later. He had mentioned Jack and his conversation at the Eire to Phil in passing one afternoon and Phil had said he would think about any possible earlier listening. This was important since Seth had become very cautious about using any information not fully verified ever since early on in his journalistic career he had made the cardinal error of not checking out hearsay and rumor fully when somebody told him that Dave Von Ronk had been the one who had actually written Bob Dylan’s classic folk song Blowin’ In The Wind. He had heard about that even years later at even folk music or journalistic convention he attended as an example of what not to do in the profession. So he was using his double check method on this question since he had been asked to write an unpaid article about the old folk days for the prestigious American Folk Song Review.
Phil continued the conversation by telling Seth, “Tell that jackass Jack Callahan didn’t he remember that in fourth grade Miss (now Ms.) Winot had played This Land Is Your Land on that old cranky record player of hers in order to teach us some kind of civics lesson, taught us that we were part of a great continental experiment. Remember that she had played the Weavers’ cover of that song with Pete Seeger doing that big bass voice thing and some other guy whose name I don’t remember was booming out the baritone and Ronnie Gilbert who just passed away was doing a big time soprano thing.” Jesus, Seth thought to himself Phil was right, right as rain. The two spoke of a few other non-music issues and then they both hung up.
That was not the end of it for Seth though, not for his article anyway. See Phil’s mentioning of the name Pete Seeger had sent a chill down his spine. Pete Seeger, and only Pete Seeger had been another reason that he had been ever cautious about sources. Back in 1965 he (and Jack and Jack’s then girlfriend now wife, Kathy, and he thought Mary Shea had been his own date) had attended the Newport Folk Festival that summer. That was the summer that Bob Dylan exploded the traditional folk universe by introducing the electric guitar into some of his songs. Did so on the stage the final night of the festival to boos and applause. Seth had been working his very first job as a free-lancer for the East Coast Other, another of the million small publications starting up and falling trying to find a niche in the print universe (free-lancer by the way since the usually cash-stripped publication had nobody else going to the concert so Seth got the assignment).
The whole story of whether Pete Seeger pulled the plug or not on Dylan became part of the urban legend of the folk scene and still has devotees on both sides of the dispute long after Pete is dead and Dylan in out on another leg of his never-ending tour. But you can bet six two and even that one Seth Garth will be checking sources to see if Miss (now Ms.) Winot was the original proponent of Woody Guthrie’s music back in the fourth grade. Enough said.
Texas-Tall-Elizabeth
Taylor, Rock Hudson And James Dean’s “Giant” (1956)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Critic Emeritus
Sam Lowell
[Please note that this
is the first film review in this space with long time film critic Sam Lowell
using the honorific emeritus- in short putting himself out to pasture. He will
still provide his reviews but will no longer be the primary, or as in earlier
times, the sole film critic here. Good luck with whatever else you decide to do
in the future-Sam. Peter Paul Markin]
Giant, starring
Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean in his last major film, and an
all-star cast including a young and very proper Dennis Hopper as a doctor son
in the days before Easy Rider, produced
and directed by George Stevens based on the novel of the same name by Edna
Ferber, 1956
I am on something of a
Modern West tear, make that a modern Texas tear, these days since a few of the
last film reviews I have penned had dealt with the period of transition from
the shoot first and ask questions later values of the Old West to the get rich
quick and live fast values of the New West. I have dealt with variations on
that theme in the change in ethos without getting chopped up and spit out in
the film adaptations of Larry McMurtry’s The
Last Picture Show and Cormac Mc Carthy’s All The Pretty Horses and now here with the film adaptation of Edna
Ferber’s Giant. All I can say is that
going through the transition maybe best personified by the character Jett Rink
in Giant is was not for the faint
–hearted any more than coming West was for those pioneers a few generations before
them.
There are plenty of
themes running through this very long film which was needed to do justice to
Ms. Ferber’s novel. (At three and one half hours if I recall correctly when I
first watched it as a kid at the Saturday afternoon matinee it was split into
two parts with an intermission to stock up on that popcorn which at a certain
age was the real treat about going to the matinee. On the DVD it is split into
Sides A and B). There is of course the mainstay legacy of old Texas cattle
barons represented by the Benedicts who pioneered the migration West
represented here by Bick, played by Rock Hudson, joined in marriage by
headstrong Leslie, she of the Maryland horsy set smitten by the handsome Bick
to head to cattle country, played by Elizabeth Taylor. There are stories
running through three generations of this family from the Bick-Leslie marriage
to the children who don’t give a damn about the so-called legacies that
agitated Bick’s generation to the grandchildren some pretty, some not so
pretty. Of course not all Texas legacies were about the gentile folk but also
the left- behind, the modern strivers of the coming oil boom and bust
represented by Benedict thorn in the side Jett Rink (great name), played by the
legendary James Dean in his last film. In the end Bick and his cattle baron
boys are lured into the very lucrative oil depletion allowance operations which
good old boy Jett pulls together (an interesting visual was all the oil
derricks working away while cattle are passing through on their way to forage
or the market).
Other themes include the
at times stormy love affair between Bick and Leslie, especially when she enters
the rich good old boy networks, the man’s world of Bick and his friends, and
speaks for herself without remorse or fear in a bid for social equality. They
will last though no question despite the ups and downs and at the end they do.
Most importantly there is a serious airing of the tradition separation of the
Anglos and Mexicans as in Ferber’s book and the racial animosity if that is the
right way to put by the Anglos treating the “wetbacks,” well just like the
blacks. There is an interesting turn around by Bick who early on had all the
social animosity of old Texas against the Mexicans (remembering the Alamo,
etc.) and slowly changes under the combined onslaught Leslie’s more progressive
views and their son’s marriage to a pretty Mexican woman. Bick almost became apoplectic
when while he and Leslie were dancing around each other she mentioned that Texas
after all had been “stolen” from the Mexicans-bright woman. (Bick in one of
the final scenes “gets religion” when a redneck cook at a roadside diner makes
racial remarks against his grandson and his daughter-in-law and another family
who wanted to, well, eat at the diner and he goes Old West mano y mano with the
cracker). If you want to see a classic example of the big screen epics of the
1950s this is your stop. That and watching James Dean eating up the camera with
his moves and his sullen “not moves”.
In Honor Of The 98th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Five- A Worker’s Dread
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
They, the murky union leadership, the dockers’ leadership, if that was what you could call it, wanted to call the whole thing off, call all hands back to work just when they, the rank and file, had shut everything on the waterfront down, and shut it down tight. Just because Lloyd George, that bloody Liberal Party Welshman, called their bluff, called their number and they came up short, the leadership so-called came up short. They didn’t have the guts to take things into their own hands and so they were parlaying what to do next. Hell, not a damn ship was moving, not a damn ship was being unloaded, nothing. Tom Jackson could see as he looked out on the Thames that in the year of our lord 1919 that there were more ships, ships from every port of call, than he had ever seen filling up each and every estuary. And with a certain pride he looked out just then because he had been the delegate in his area that had responsible for closing most of the port down, and having those beautiful ships, ships from each port of call as he liked to say to the boys over a pint at the Black Swan after a hard day of unloading those damn cargoes, sitting idle, sitting idle upon a workingman’s decision that they stay idle. And now the damn leadership wanted to give up the game.
Tom Jackson had been a union man, a dockers’ union man, for all of his twenty –seven years, or at least since he knew what a union was, and his father before him (that was how he got the job as a casual that started his career) and the Jackson clan had been working men since, since he reckoned Chartist times when old Ben Jackson led his clan out of Scotland to raise hell about the working man’s right to vote, something like that, Tom wasn’t always clear on the particulars of that history although he knew for certain that it involved the Chartists of blessed memory.
Most of the time he had been content to be a union man, pay his dues, and support any actions that the leadership proposed. And have a pint or two with the boys at his beloved Black Swan and then go home to Anne and the two little ones. But the damn war of unblessed memory had changed things. He had been lucky enough to be exempt since the government desperately needed men to unload the massive loads of materials to be eaten up by the war. They had worked twelve, fourteen, sixteen hour shifts to whittle down the backlog. At the same pay. And no one, no one least of all Tom Jackson, complained while the war was on. They, he, saw the work as their patriotic duty. But now, now that war was over the dock owners, the shipping companies, and their agents wanted to keep all the dough for themselves and keep the steady dockers working at that same damn rate. And hence the strike.
Tom Jackson was also a Labor Party man, although unlike in the union he held not office nor was he active in his local branch. He just voted Labor, like his father before him (and before that Liberal when Gladstone of father’s blessed memory was alive). The party was also ready to call it quits, call all hands back. Tom Jackson was in a quandary. His assistant steward (and pint or two companion in sunnier times), Bill Armstrong, was a headstrong younger man who had been a member of the Social-Democratic Federation before the war and since had been tinkering with the small groups of communists that were running around London of late. Bill had told him that the Labor Party would sell them out, the union leaders would sell them out but that a new group, a group headed by the Bolsheviks over in Russia, the same ones they, the dockers, had previously helped by not loading military equipment the government wanted to send the White Guards that were fighting a civil war against those same Bolsheviks, a grouping called the Communist International would not sell them out.
Tom listened to what Bill had to say but dismissed it out of hand. He was not going to get involved, get Anne and the two kids involved in international intrigue. No, something would happen and things would work out. Something did happen a couple of days later. The strike was officially called off with nothing won. Tom was angry for a time but then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he said he could not abandon his union, his Labor Party or his Black Swan for some new adventure…
In
Honor OfWomen’s History Month- From The
Archives-The Anniversary Of Betty
Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique-In The Time Of Not Her Time
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Delores Reilly had to laugh, chuckle really, with a little
sourness around the edges, as she listened to her daily kids at school show on
the radio The Sammy Williams Show, the
two hour morning talk on the Boston station WMXY.
This morning Sammy had a panel, a panel of women, mostly from the sound of
it, professional women, who were discussing this latest bombshell book by a
woman named Betty Freidman, a book entitled The
Feminine Mystique. What Betty had written about was the vast number of
women, women from her generation or a little younger, who were now fed up with
their little suburban white picket fence manicured lawn ranch house- all spic
and span modern appliances- have a martini ready for hubby at five, maybe a
roll in the hay later after the kids went to bed, missionary-style- five days a
week house-bound routine and weekends not much better, hubby tired after
gouging somebody all week-over-educated under-loved, under-appreciated and
under-utilized lives. After listening in some disbelief, and in some hidden
sorrow, for a while Delores Reilly (nee Kelly) got a little wistful when she
thought about her own life, her own not suburban Valhalla life.
Funny she had been somewhat educated herself, her father the
distant old Daniel who nevertheless was practical and insisted that she get
more education after high school, to learn a skill, although maybe not like
those panel women, not like Betty’s complaining suburbanite women from Wellesley,
Sarah Lawrence or Barnard, having gone to Fisher Secretarial School over in
Boston and having worked down at the North Adamsville Shipyard before she got
married, married to her love, Kenneth Reilly. But that is where the breaks kind
of stopped, that marriage point. She had met Kenneth at a USO dance down at the
Hingham Naval Depot toward the end of World War II when many soldiers and
sailors were being processed for demobilization. Kenneth had been a Marine, had
seen some tough battles in the Pacific, including Guadalcanal (although he like
many men of his generation did not talk about it, about the hellish war, all
that much) and had been stationed at the Depot. He sure looked devilishly handsome
in his Marine dress uniform and that was that. They were married shortly after
that, moved to the other side of North Adamsville in an apartment her father
found for them, and then in quick succession within a little over three years they
had produced three sons, three hungry sons, as it turned out.
Not an unusual start, certainly not for the generation who
had withstood the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought the devils in World
War II. However, Kenneth, dear sweet Kenneth, might have been a great Marine,
and might too have been a great coalminer down where he came from in
Prestonsburg down in coal country Harlan and Hazard, Kentucky before he joined
up to fight but he had no skills, no serious money skills that could be used
around Boston. So they had lived in that run- down apartment for many years
even after the three boys had outgrown the place. Kenny’s work history, last
hired usually, first fired always meant too that Delores had to work, not work
in her skilled profession but mother’s hours (really any hours she could get,
including nights) at Mister Dee’s Donut Shop filling jelly donuts and other
assorted menial tasks. And that was that for a number of years.
For a while in the late 1950s Kenny had a steady job, with
good pay, and with her filling donuts (the poor kids had many a snack, too
many, of day-old left over donuts she would bring home), they were able to
purchase a small shack of a house on the wrong side of the tracks, though at
least a house of their own. Not a ranch house with a manicured lawn like Betty’s
women were complaining of, but a bungalow with a postage stamp- sized lawn
filled when they arrived with the flotsam and jetsam of a million years’ worth
of junk left by the previous owners. Something out of a Walker Evans photograph
like ones she would see in Life magazine
now that Jack Kennedy was doing something for her husband’s kindred down in
Appalachia.A place with no hook-up for
a washing machine and dryer so she had to every week or so trudge down to the
local Laundromat to do the family washing. A place with just enough room to fit
a table in the kitchen if the kids ate in shifts. A place where, well why go on
she thought, those were the breaks and while things had been tough, money
tight, other kids making fun of her kids when they were younger and having
fights over it, those three boy starting to get old enough to get in some
trouble, or close to it, she had her man, she had her stalwart Kenny who never
complained about his lack of breaks. Still, still Delores dreamed, wistful
dreamed that she had had a few things those women were getting all hot and
bothered about being stuck with…
And hence this Women’s History Month commemoration.
NEW WARS / OLD WARS– What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
A VERY PERSONAL CALL FOR PEACE IN SYRIA
I’m talking to Tima Kurdi [Alan Kurdi’s aunt] around the same time as the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, releases a new report on the battle for Aleppo. The Atlantic Council has long called for regime change in Syria. This report comes out just when new ceasefires have been negotiated and when parts of the armed rebels have decided to hold talks with the Syrian government. The only real fighting groups amongst the rebels that remain of consequence are ISIS and the al-Qaeda portmanteau group Tahrir al-Sham, as I reported a few weeks ago. None of this mattered to the Atlantic Council. The Council calls for three strategies to undercut the peace initiatives afoot in Syria. First, to provide ‘robust support for local allies on the ground’, namely the elusive ‘moderate opposition.’ As Tima Kurdi said to me, ‘there are no moderate rebels in Syria.’ Those days are long gone. Second, for ‘direct kinetic action’ which is military jargon for armed action by the United States. Third, for the creation of safe zones within Syria, which is precisely what a ceasefire initiative and peace process would create. Point one and two are anathema to Tima Kurdi, who urges support for the peace process to ‘stop the war in Syria.’ More
Alan Kurdi lies dead on a beach inTurkey
SIGN PETITION SUPPORTING
'Stop Arming Terrorists Act' H.R. 608
United for Peace and Justice has joined with the U.S. Peace Council, Veterans for Peace and several other national peace organizations to initiate a public campaign in support of Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s (D-Hawaii) STOP ARMING TERRORISTS ACT (H.R. 608), which she originally introduced to the Congress on December 8, 2016.
H.R. 608 is a bipartisan bill, which has been co-sponsored by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vermont), Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-North Carolina), and Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Florida).
PATRICK COCKBURN: 'Donald Trump will spark a war with Iran'
Given the high decibel level of the Trump administrations threats and warnings, it is impossible to distinguish bellicose rhetoric from real operational planning. A confrontation with Iran will probably not come soon; but in a year or two, when previous policies conceived under Obama have run their course, Trump may well feel that he has to show how much tougher and more effective he is than his predecessor, whom he has denounced as weak and incompetent. This administration is so heavily loaded with crackpots, fanatics and amateurs, that it would be optimistic to imagine that they will pass safely through the political swamplands of the Middle East without detonating a crisis with which they cannot cope. More
Yemen: In the Shadow of Death -- George Capaccio
Some critics are calling the January 30 raid in Yemen a botched affair. Insufficient or incorrect intelligence and poor planning, they argue, are responsible for the chaos that erupted when the Navy Seals launched their raid and ended up causing excessive “collateral damage.” Sean Spicer, Trump’s adversarial press secretary, lashed out at anyone — including Arizona Senator John McCain — who calls the raid a failure. In Spicer’s view, such malcontents and naysayers owe an apology to Ryan Owens, the soldier who was killed in the raid: “It's absolutely a success, and I think anyone that would suggest [the raid is] not a success does a disservice to the life of Chief Ryan Owens." What about the life of Nawar al-Awlaki and the lives of the other women and children whom the soldiers ended up killing? Don’t they deserve an apology? Better than an apology, don’t their families deserve some form of compensation for the loss of their loved ones? More
Lessons and Propaganda From the Botched Raid on Yemen
The Trump administration’s first “kinetic” military action, last weekend’s raid on Yemen that killed a Navy SEAL as well as fifteen women and children, was an operational failure. Aggravating that failure has been the aggressive propaganda spin applied by the White House. According to White House spokesman Sean Spicer, the operation was a major success… Nearly everything went wrong in the Yemen raid. Surprise wasn’t achieved. US troops were killed and wounded. Far too many non-combatants (innocent civilians) were killed, including an eight-year-old girl. A $75 million Osprey malfunctioned and had to be destroyed. To hazard a guess, this raid probably cost the US in the neighborhood of $250 million while failing to achieve its main objective. Meanwhile, the enemy put up fierce resistance with weaponry, mainly small arms and explosives, that probably cost less than $100,000. In brief, the US raid on Yemen was prodigal in cost, profligate in resources, and unproductive in results. More
With all the manufactured hyperventilating over alleged “Russian interference” in our elections, Israel, the country that has actually intervened in our politics on a regular basis remains unmentioned in our media.
Israel interferes in our politics all the time, and it’s never a scandal
Israel tried to interfere in that 2012 election, as Chris Matthews sensibly reminded his audience recently: Benjamin Netanyahu tried to help Mitt Romney beat Obama. Sheldon Adelson held a fundraiser in Jerusalem for Romney. Netanyahu didn’t stop there. After Romney lost, Netanyahu came to Congress to tell the Congress to reject President Obama’s nuclear deal. That was an unprecedented interference of a foreign leader in our policy-making, enabled by the Israel lobby; but there were never any investigations about that. Subsequently Chuck Schumer said he was torn between a Jewish interest and the American interest, before voting against the president, and he paid no political/reputational price for it; while President Obama said that it would be an “abrogation” of his constitutional duty if he considered Israel’s interest ahead of the U.S.; for which Obama was called an anti-semite… The Israeli interference in our politics is the conspiracy in plain sight that no one in the media talks about because they’re too implicated themselves. More
A DEVIL WE KNOW
Donald Trump’s victory has become an occasion for soul-searching and fierce debate among liberals, leftists, and their allies. But lost in the mix of all the recriminations and arguments is a clear-eyed attempt to imagine what life for Americans will actually look like under Trump—and then, what we want it to be after he is out of office. If we are to look beyond the next four years, we must create a movement that is not simply anti-Trump, but that presents left politics as a compelling alternative. In preparing to fight the anti-labor, anti-immigrant, racist, and misogynist policies of a Trump administration, history can help us understand how activists and radicals in previous eras of social turmoil fought for a better future… Today, as terrifying as it is to confront, the left needs to consider that white nationalism, misogyny, and xenophobia always lurks underneath the veneer of modern politics. Donald Trump has simply revealed to us the nation that, in more pessimistic moments, many of us knew existed. But rather than succumb to the despair of “this is not the America I know,” we must instead say, “I will fight for the America I want.” More
Resisting Trump: The Great American Awakening
“As the nightmare reality of Donald Trump sinks in, we need to put our resistance in a larger perspective,” Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman wrote recently, describing Trump as “our imperial vulture come home to roost.” The context in which most Trumpnews is delivered is miniscule: more or less beginning and ending with the man himself — his campaign, his businesses, his appointees, his ego, his endless scandals (“what did he know and when did he know it?”) — which maintains the news at the level of entertainment, and surrounds it with the fantasy context of a United States that used to be an open, fair and peace-loving democracy, respectful of all humanity. In other words, Trump is the problem, and if he goes away, we can get back to what we used to be… But the time has come to face the totality of who we are and reach for real change. I believe this is what we are seeing in the streets right now. Americans — indeed, people across the planet — are ceasing to be spectators in the creation of the future. The protests we’re witnessing aren’t so much anti-Trump as pro-humanity and pro-Planet Earth. More
Flynn’s Departure is a Win for Peace
Flynn was dangerous not because he was a political flake but because he combined his troubling worldview with serious military credentials that earned him Trump’s respect. He wrote what is practically a guide book on fighting a global religious war, titled The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies. Flynn has also tweeted that “fear of Muslims is RATIONAL” (his emphasis) and has said that “Islam is a political ideology” and “a cancer” that “hides behind being a religion.” And he was a purveyor of the ridiculous notion that “Shariah law” is spreading in the United States… If you had to bet where Flynn might have helped take Trump into war, your best bet would be Iran. Flynn has argued that Iran is the “linchpin” in the war against “radical Islam.” In a recent White House press briefing, heasserted that Iran’s ballistic missile test violated the Iran nuclear agreement, which it did not. Flynn went on to say, “as of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice,” hinting that another missile test from Iran could lead the United States to take military action. More
America's spies anonymously took down Michael Flynn. That is deeply worrying.
The United States is much better off without Michael Flynn serving as national security adviser. But no one should be cheering the way he was brought down. The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America's democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn's ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn't the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function… Members of the unelected, unaccountable intelligence community are not the right someone, especially when they target a senior aide to the president by leaking anonymously to newspapers the content of classified phone intercepts, where the unverified, unsubstantiated information can inflict politically fatal damage almost instantaneously. More
STEPHEN WALT: Five Ways Donald Trump Is Wrong About Islam
Donald Trump took up so bandwidth during the 2016 election cycle that we all paid insufficient attention to the people lurking within his campaign operation who have now moved into key policymaking positions… What unites these people — and seems to drive Bannon in particular — is a belief that the United States, and, indeed, the entire Judeo-Christian West, is under siege from an insidious and powerful foe: “radical Islam.” See this article here, or this one. For the most extreme of them (that is, Gaffney), there’s no real distinction between jihadi terrorists and the entire Muslim religion. In this view, a hardened Islamic State killer is no different from that nice Muslim family who lives downstairs, next door, or across the street… There’s only one thing wrong with this view as a template for U.S. foreign policy: It’s completely at odds with reality. Specifically, it ignores the true balance of power, overlooks the deep divisions within Islam itself, exaggerates the danger of terrorism and relies on assorted myths Islamophobes have been ceaselessly spouting for decades. More
