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
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Strike and Protest on May 1st in Boston!
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We need to disrupt “business as usual” to defeat Trump’s agenda. Working people have the potential power to strike a blow at Trump and his billionaire backers by shutting down their profits on May 1.
Alongside immigrant organizations and labor unions, we will take action against the deportations, Trump’s wall, the Muslim ban, anti-union laws and attacks on women’s reproductive rights. We will oppose any retaliation by employers or schools against workers or students who strike or walk out on May Day.
Join us for this powerful protest on May 1st in Boston!
An Encore -In The Time Of Elvis' Time-One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane
Sam Lowell, considered himself a corner boy from the time in the early 1960s when in the working-class neighborhoods of America were filled to the brim with such guys hanging out on the corners, in his case North Adamsville not far from urban Boston. Here is the progression not too atypical of corner boys with too little money and too much time on their hands which underscored the corner boy 1960s night plight (and which still plagues corner boys even though they no longer for the most part hang on corners but malls and other places where there are not any “No trespassing, police take notice” signs to harass young men still with not enough dough and too much time on their hands). If you grew up in the Acre, Sam’s growing up section of town you progressed from one place in elementary school, another in junior high school when corners and who was on what corner started to get sorted out in earnest, and high school where the corners were doled out hard as steel in high school.
Places like South Boston (an all Irish enclave then where even those who like Sam’s maternal grandparents had moved out of the enclave to an Irish neighborhood in North Adamsville were considered suspect, were looked at with jaundiced eye even by the relatives left behind), Main Street in Nashua (at the time a dying city what with the mills heading south to cheaper labor and eventually overseas and so a tough place to dream in), New Hampshire, 125th Street in high Harlem< New York City (with all the excitement of jazz and be-bop but with all the high segregation of the South except for the formality of Mister James Crow’s laws),any of a million spots on Six Mile Road in Detroit (never a place of dreams but of steady work in the golden age of the American automobile for those from Delta Mister James Crow black refugees to the Okie/Arkie white rabble coming out of the hills and dustbowls), the same on Division Street in Chi town (the beat street divide of many of Nelson Algren’s tales of drugs, urban lost-ness, and sullen back streets disappointments), the lower end of North Beach beyond where the “beats” of a few years before did their beat thing (the places where the longshoremen and waterfront workers did their heavy drinking after work and where the sailors off their Pacific ocean ships fought all- comers from the Artic to the Japan seas).
Jack Slack’s was the last port of call for the Acre crowd, for that motley collection of corner boys picked up and discarded along the way although the core of Frankie , Jack, Jimmy, Allan, Markin and Five-Fingers held throughout which had started at Doc’s Drugstore complete with sofa fountain and shiny glass penny candy-case to draw selections from after school to energize up for the real world activities of kid-dom in elementary school, Miller’s Diner for the jukebox in junior high when they were just becoming aware of girls, maybe having to dance with them, and maybe trying to figure out, the eternal trying to figure out how to approach them without them giggling back and Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in early high school before the new owners decided that unlike Tonio, the previous owner who sold out to go back to Italy from when he came as a boy they did not want colorful rough-necked boys standing one knee against the wall in front of their family friendly establishment scaring the bejesus out of the important Friday and Saturday give Mom a break family trade.
That time, those early 1960s times for some reason known only to them, was time that you had best have had corner boy comrades when you hung out on date-less, girl-less, dough-less Friday and Saturday nights to have your back if trouble brewed (that “comrade” not a word to be used then in the tail end of the height of the red scare Cold War night not if you wanted knuckle sandwiches from the unthinking patriotic guys but that does convey the sense of “having your back” critical to your place in those woe begotten streets).
That corner boy business extended through the 1960s after high school for a couple of years when in addition to being a corner boy Sam became a “flower child” along with his long mourned and lamented friend the late Peter Paul Markin heading out west on the hitchhike roads when the world turned upside down later in the decade. (Markin who met a horrible end down in sunny Mexico after the fresh breeze of the 1960s turned in on itself and he got flat-footed by the backlash ebb tide riptide and could no longer hold back his “from hunger” wanting habits held in check through summers of love and a tight tour of Vietnam and made the fatal, very fatal, mistake of trying to broker an independent drug deal and got two slugs to the back of his head for the attempt.) Sam, now a sedate grandfatherly semi-retired lawyer filled with respectability and memories had to laugh about how much he of late had been thinking about the 1950s, about not just those corner boy days but about the music that drove every corner boy, including Markin, make that perhaps most of all Markin, to distraction as they tried to eke out a sound that they could call their own. A jailbreak sound that was not something their parents would approve of at a time when titanic generational battles were foaming at the mouth.
Thinking about the 1950s the times when he came of age, came of musical age, an age very mixed up with that corner boy comradery, that hanging at Doc’s and Miller’s Diner when he started noticing girls and their charms (amid the first blush of giggles which he soon figured out was their rational response to whatever was going on inside their bodies just like guys like Sam were going through in their bodies). Those first noticings started his life-long journey of trying to figure out what made them tick, what they wanted, wanted of him, from a girl-less family making everything that much harder. Noticing that they too hung around Miller’s in order to play that fantastic jukebox which had all the latest tunes and plenty of oldies too (oldies being let’s say we are talking about 1958 then maybe 1955 hits like Eddie, My Love, Rock Around The Clock, and Bo Diddley showing that teen time, youth time anyway is measured differently from old man lawyerly time, measured in days, weeks, months at the most-years were beyond the pale) drawing away from the music on his parents’ family living room radio and their cranky old record player music.
Music in the teen households emphatically not on Miller’s jukebox or there would have been a civil war no question, a civil war avoided in his own home after his parents had bought, to insure domestic peace and tranquility if he remembered correctly, his first transistor radio down at the now long gone Radio Shack store and he could sit up in his room and dream of whatever coming of age boys dreamed about, mainly how those last year’s bothersome girls became this year’s interesting objects of discussion (by the way in that small crowded upstairs bedroom, shared with his two brothers, he found out he could discover the beauty of the “hold up to your ear” transistor radio and drown out the world of brotherly scuffings).
More than that though, more than just thinking about the old days like every old guy probably does, even guys who had not been lawyers as a professional career, guys who you see sitting on park benches, a little disheveled, maybe some crumbs in their unkempt beards, feeding the birds and half-muttering to themselves about how when FDR was around everybody stood tall, every country bent it knees in homage to America, or else, or old bag ladies rummaging through trash barrels looking for long lost lovers or their faded beauty Sam had been purchasing compilations of what are commercially called “oldies but goodies” CDs. Doing so via the user-friendly confines of the Internet, at Amazon if you need a name like today anybody, except maybe three people up in heathen Alaska or the Artic, doesn’t know that is the site to get such material these days instead of traipsing over half the East Coast trying to cadge a few examples from the dwindling oldies and used records emporia, and purchasing several record compilations of the “best of” that period from a commercial distributor (and also keeping up to date on various versions of the songs on YouTube) and through his friend and old corner boy Frankie Riley been spilling plenty of cyber-ink on Frankie’s blog, In The Be-Bop ‘50s Night, going back to the now classic age of rock and roll.
Sam had to laugh about that situation back in the day as well since he had been well known back on the corner, back holding up the wall in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, on many of those date-less, date-less because although he might have been an all “hail fellow, well met” hard-assed corner boy full of bluster and blah he was sister-less and hence baffled by girls and their ways and very shy around the question of asking for dates although he was quite willing to tell each and every girl who would listen to him about ten thousand fact on any of sixteen subjects, not excluding science, philosophy, and the poor fate of the Red Sox then. Although those ten thousand facts would come in handy when he got to college a couple of years later and he had girls hanging off the walls in debate class waiting for him to ask them out then those precious facts did not add up to a date by osmosis but rather incomprehension even by girls like Patty Lewis and Mary Shea who liked him and would have be glad if he asked them for a date without the ten thousand facts, thank you.
Here though is something about the mores of the time that young people today might not comprehend girls just waited for guys to make a move, or moved on to the next guy who would, especially if he had a boss ’55 Chevy, like Patty and Mary did. Also girl-less (already explained but here the question is having a serious girl and the just mentioned facts will hold here as well), and dough-less (self-explanatory in working-class North Adamsville, the sorry fate of the working poor, the marginally employed like his father, no money when the rent was due and Ma had not money for the damn rent collector much less discretionary money for dates with girls) on Friday and Saturday nights when he proclaimed to all who would listen (mainly Frankie, Markin, Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Kenny Hogan and Johnny “Thunder” Thornton and an occasional girl who all wondered what he was talking about) that “rock and roll will never die.”
Mainly, through the archival marvels of modern technology, pay-per-song, look on YouTube, check out Amazon Sam had been right, rock and roll had not died although it clearly no longer provided the same fuel for later generations more into hip-hop-ish, techno music, or edge city rock. But Sam always though it funny when kids, his grandkids, for example, heard (and saw) Elvis, all steamy, smoldering and swiveling in some film clip to make the older almost teenage girls among them almost react like the girls in his time did when they saw him on the Ed Sullivan Show and had half-formed girlish dreams about personally erasing that snarl from his face. Especially that flip clip of the prison number in Jailhouse Rock. Bo Diddley proclaiming to the whole wide world that he in fact had put the rock in rock and roll and who could dispute that claim when he went bonkers in some Afro-Carib number with that rectangular guitar. Say too Chuck Berry telling a candid world, a candid teenage world which after all was all that counted then, now too from what Sam had heard from his grandchildren, that Mister Beethoven from the old fogy music museum had better take himself and his cronies and move over because a new be-bop daddy, a new high sheriff was in town, was taking the reins, making the kids jump on jump street. Ditto curl-in-hair Buddy Holly pining away for his Peggy Sue.
Better, mad monk swamp rat Jerry Lee Lewis sitting, maybe standing for all Sam knew telling that same candid world that Chuck was putting on fire everybody had to do the high school hop bop, confidentially. And how about Wanda Jackson proclaiming that it was party time and an endless host of one hit wonders and wanna-bes they went crazy over. Yeah, those kids, those for example grandkids jumping around just like the young Sam who could not believe his ears when he had come of age and, yeah, jumping around for those same guys who formed his musical tastes back in the 1950s when he had come of age, musical age anyway. Jesus, Jesus too when he came of teenage age and all that meant of angst and alienation something no generation seems to be able to escape since the world had no less dangerous, no less incomprehensible today.
Sam had thought recently about going back to those various commercially-produced compilations put out by demographically savvy media companies that he had purchased on Amazon to cull out the better songs, some which he had on the tip of his tongue almost continuously since the 1950s (the Dubs Could This Be Magic the great last chance dance song that bailed him out of being shut out of more than one dance night although his partner’s feet borne the brunt of the battle, and the Teen Queens Eddie My Love, where Eddie took advantage of the girl and she was wondering, maybe still is, when he is coming back, a great love ‘em and leave ‘em song and the answer is still he’s never coming back, are two examples that quickly came to his mind). Others like Johnny Ace’s Pledging My Love or The Crows Oh-Gee though needed some coaxing by listening to the compilations to be remembered.
But Sam, old lawyerly Sam, had finally found a sure-fire method to aid in that memory coaxing. Just go back in memory’s mind and picture scenes from teenage days and figure the songs that went with such scenes (this is not confined to 1950s aficionados anybody can imagine their youth times and play). But even using that method Sam believed that he was cheating a little, harmlessly cheating but still cheating. When he (or anybody familiar with the times) looked at the artwork on most of the better 1950s CD compilations one could not help but notice the excellent artwork that highlights various institutions illustrated back then. The infamous drive-in movies where you gathered about six people (hopefully three couples but six anyway) and paid for two the other four either on the back seat floor or in the trunk. They always played music at intermission when that “youth nation” cohort gathered at the refreshment stand to grab inedible hot dogs, stale popcorn, or fizzled out sodas, although who cared, especially if that three couples thing was in play, and that scene had always been associated in Sam’s mind with Frankie Lyman and the Teenager’s Why Do Fools Fall In Love.
That is how Sam played the game. Two (or more) can play so he said he would just set the scenes and others could fill in their own musical selections. Here goes: the first stirrings of interest in the opposite sex at Doc’s Drugstore with his soda fountain AND jukebox; the drive-in restaurant with you and yours in the car, yours’ or father-borrowed for an end of the night bout with cardboard hamburgers, ultra-greasy french fries and diluted soda; the Spring Frolic Dance (or name your seasonal dance) your hands all sweaty, trying to disappear into the wall, waiting, waiting to perdition for that last dance so that you could ask that he or she that you had been eyeing all evening to dance that slow one all dreamy; down at the beach on day one of out of school for the summer checking out the scene between the two boat clubs where all the guys and gals who counted hung out; the night before Thanksgiving football rally where he or she said they would be there, how about you; on poverty nights sitting up in your bedroom listening to edgy WMEX on your transistor radio away from prying adult eyes; another poverty night you and your boys, girls, boys and girls sitting in the family room spinning platters; that first sixth grade “petting” party (no more explanation needed, right); cruising Main Street with your boys or girls looking for, well, you figure it out listening to the radio in that “boss” Chevy, hopefully; and, sitting in the balcony “watching” the double feature at the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon when you were younger and at night when older. Okay, Sam has given enough cues. Fill in the dots, oops, songs and add scenes too.
In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Five
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
For a number of years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 in each January under the headline-Honor The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since every January
Leftists honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin.
I have made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today, still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison to choke off the flow of war materials.
I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War.
This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight thestruggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, in order to define himself politically.
Below is a fifth sketch written as part of a series posted over several days before Lenin’s birthday on the American Left History blog starting on April 16th (see archives) of a young fictional labor militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary developments in the Russia of the Tsar toward the end of the 19th century and early 20th century which will help define the problems facing the working-class there then, and the ones that Lenin had to get a handle on.
****
Ivan Smilga did not know the first moment when he resolved to go after his lover Elena Kassova who was being prepared for deportation to Siberia and either aid her escape or share her fate. Ivan found that he needed to deal with the question of Elena’s fate after returning to Saint Petersburg shortly after New Year’s Day 1900 and finding that his “engaged” Elena Kassova had been arrested for political crimes and was being held for trial prior to deportation to Siberia. She had organized, or had attempted to organize since it never got off the ground, a demonstration on New Year’s Day calling for political rights from the Tsar in front of the Winter Palace. The minute the fifty or so students and workers stepped off onto the street they were arrested and thus there had to have been a Tsarist agent who had infiltrated the organization a problem inherent in the revolutionary movement. Ivan had, as a result of his own transportation to Siberia and some reflection on what was possible under the Tsar, totally opposed Elena’s projectand had left Saint Petersburg in a furious state when she said that she was going ahead with the demonstration. All Ivan knew was that he was ashamed that he had left the city in a huff after several quarrels about Elena’s leadership role in that political demonstration proposed for that New Year’s Day. A day when the bloody sabre-wielding Cossacks had wreaked havoc on the small demonstration before it even stepped off before the Winter Palace. He was ashamed first that he had not been there to share her fate and secondly that Elena had been right, right all along that, something more than getting better wages and working conditions needed to be done to bring Mother Russia into the new century.
Ivan reddened as he thought about how he had constantly belittled Elena (and her friends and associates, mostly sparsely-bearded radical students from Saint Petersburg University and a smattering of young workers, some from his own Putilov Works) around what Mother Russia did or did not need. Mainly that the fight for wages, for shorter hours and for a union was enough to carry the day. He could begin to see that even those demands could not be met without more political organization than that necessary for shop floor issues. Ivan wasn’t sure what that might be but he knew he had been wrong to rattle Elena’s confidence by dismissing her notion that a political party, a revolutionary party from the looks of the situation, was necessary to fight the Tsar and his minions. He cringed when he thought about how he had laughed out loud and said that Russia had too many political parties already.
But politics, or finding out what politics would serve the ends desired, was not really what drove Ivan to distraction. Ivan loved Elena in the old-fashioned way like a wayward backward peasant boy. He had wronged her and therefore it was his responsibility to right that wrong and hence his resolve. Maybe by going to Siberia he would win back her respect. Maybe even join her and her comrades in their quixotic fight against the massive Tsarist repression. He was not looking forward to going back to Siberia after his prior tour there a few years back when he had served his own two year sentence for political crimes (a scatterbrain scheme involving holding responsible governmental officials hostage in return for some political action which had been betrayed by one of the workers in the cell) but he needed to go. Who knows what the future held but all Ivan knew was that whatever Elena’s fate that was his as well.
The veil of tears, again
is just about right for a headline dealing with a book "Killers
Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI." by New
Yorker staff writer David Grann where we yet again hear of another atrocity
by whites against Native Americans. This
time a grand conspiracy not to grab land but dough from the wealth provided by
the discovery of oil on Osage Nation land. You know someday if there ever is
some kind of socialist government one of the big plans will entail making some
kind of reparations to the descendants of all those who were here when the first
whites arrived. That is for damn sure.
A Year Or Two With
Ernest-“Papa: Hemingway In Cuba” (2015)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Critic Sandy
Salmon
[As long-time readers
know I have recently taken over the day to day chores of film review for this
site from my old friend and competitor from the American Film Gazette days Sam Lowell (that old friend and
competitor by the way Sam’s designation not mine). He has on occasion like
recently in reviewing a couple of rock and roll tribute-type films which I did
not feel were worthy of coverage taken advantage of his privilege to write
something here if the “spirit moves him” (his expression “stolen” from the
Quakers I believe).
That was well and good
when it came to those rock and roll films where madmen DJs run a pirate radio
station off the coast of England when they are thwarted by the appropriate
authorities concerned about the corrupting of the morals of the youth who were
gravitating toward the seductive lure of rock music or when a slumming grunge
band type mad monk put together a rock band composed of fourth-graders but when
Sam tried to horn in a review of a movie connected to a serious literary figure
like Ernest Hemingway I had to put my foot down. We had both viewed the film
together and he had tried to invoke some seniority baloney to grab this one. I
had to take the exceptional step and go to the site administrator Pete Markin
and have him explain the “what for” to the recalcitrant Mister Lowell. You see
whose name is on the byline so you know how Pete decided “what for.” Sandy
Salmon]
Papa: Hemingway in Cuba,
starring Giovanni Ribisi, Joely Richardson, Adrian Sparks, filmed in Cuba,
2015
No question young men,
maybe women too but Ernest Hemingway by subject matter and by reputation seemed
to be the quintessential man’s man writer for good or evil, of the generation
before mine and of my own generation who had a taste for the literary life saw him
(along with Scott Fitzgerald on his good days, his The Great Gatsby good days) as the paragon of solid sparse writing
that drew us in. As a kid anything to do with Hemingway was grabbed up by me
and devoured on many a late night lights out read (and re-devoured many times if
such a thing can happen with the written word). So when a colleague and I, a
man of my generation, saw this film under review together, Papa: Hemingway In Cuba, we almost came to blows about who would
review the thing. That emotional response despite the fact that both of us
agreed that the film itself seemed kind of maudlin and less than informative as
a slice of life semi-biopic.
Naturally since the film
is not an actual biopic about either Hemingway or the young writer, Denn Bart
Petticlerc, whose memoir the film is based on the producers used plenty of
cinematic license in translating that story to the screen (just as any
self-respecting writer would use a great deal of literary license to the same
effect). But they got the main thrust of the memoir right-the story of how a
young writer (Ed Myers in the film played by Giovanni Ribisi) caught the
attention of Ernest Hemingway (played by Adrian Spark who looked the very image
of Papa when I looked at some old photographs) and developed a mentor-kind of
surrogate son relationship late in Papa’s life a couple of years before he put
an end to his saga with a shotgun blast to his head.
As already noted this
film suffered from some overwrought emotional scenes of Hemingway in decline,
in a love-hate relationship with Mary which seemed cruelty itself on both their
parts at time. The real shocker for any writer watching though was Hemingway’s
frustration that he could no longer write, had “writer’s block” the dreaded
words that every writer, pro or amateur, wakes up in the midnight hour sweating
about. Papa had the shakes that way too. Maybe he had lost it at the end but go
read The Sun Also Rises, For Whom The
Bells Toll, and The Old Man and The
Sea if you want to know what it was like when Papa had the words, when he
wrote those sparse clean words for keeps.
Boston Socialist Unity Project Conference 2017, 4/21-22
The 2nd annual Boston Socialist Unity Project Conference (BSUP2) is a powerhouse of ideas and organizing!
The opening night event features Barbara Madeloni (Union President, Massachusetts Teachers Association) and Eugene Puryear (Millions for Prisoners). Boston’s own Foundation Movement, conscious hip hop artists, open the evening and Swiss-based Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore bring Irish revolutionary songs to the closing. [Friday, April 21, 2017 @ 7:00 p.m., MIT Building 34-101, 50 Vassar Street]
On Saturday (9-5 pm)Sherri Mitchell (Land Peace Foundation) and Fred Magdoff (University of Vermont) connect indigenous organizing and environmental movements with the struggles to get beyond capitalism and build socialist movements. Our lunchtime plenary presents political strategies for challenging the system: it features the Democratic Socialists of America, the Green-Rainbow Party,Our Revolution, and the Socialist Party (list in formation).
With recent US armed action in Syria, Vijay Prashad’s closing plenary speech on Imperialism could not be more important and timely!
Two sessions of five to six participatory workshops will showcase movement-building work and feature many of our plenary speakers (Mitchell, Magdoff, Prashad, and Puryear). It will also draw in some of the most important and exemplary movement work being performed by City Life/Vida Urbana, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Boston Institute for Non-Profit Journalism, MIT’s Student Activist Coalition, and Socialists on Single-Payer. Their topics include indigenous organizing and solidarity, housing and the city, education, media organizing, building movements for racial justice, the peace movement, and imperialism.
Breakfast and lunch options available with MIT vendors, Food for Activists, and Food Not Bombs.
Everyone is welcome, $10 suggested donation (online); nobody turned away for lack of funds.
*****Frank Jackman’s Fate-With Bob Dylan’s Masters of War In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Jack Callahan’s old friend from Sloan High School in Carver down in Southeastern Massachusetts Zack James (Zack short for Zachary not as is the fashion today to just name a baby Zack and be done with it) is an amateur writer and has been at it since he got out of high school. Found out that maybe by osmosis, something like that, the stuff Miss Enos taught him junior and senior years about literature and her favorite writers Hemingway, Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker to name a few, that she would entice the English class stuck with him with through college where although he majored in Political Science he was in thrall to the English literature courses that he snuck in to his schedule. Snuck in although Zack knew practically speaking he had a snowball’s chance in hell, an expression he had learned from Hemingway he thought,of making a career out of the literary life as a profession, would more likely wind driving a cab through dangerous midnight sections of town occasionally getting mugged for his night’s work. That Political Science major winding up producing about the same practical results as the literary life though. Stuck with him, savior stuck with him, through his tour of duty during the Vietnam War, and savior stayed with him through those tough years when he couldn’t quite get himself back to the “real” world after ‘Nam and let drugs and alcohol rule his life so that he wound up for some time as a “brother under the bridge” as Bruce Springsteen later put the situation in a song that he played continuously at times after he first heard it “Saigon, long gone…." Stuck with him after he recovered and started building up his sports supplies business, stuck with him through three happy/sad/savage/acrimonious “no go” marriages and a parcel of kids and child support.And was still sticking with him now that he had time to stretch out and write longer pieces, and beat away on the word processor a few million words on this and that.
Amateur writer meaning nothing more than that he liked to write and that writing was not his profession, that he did not depend on the pen for his livelihood(or rather more correctly these days not the pen but the word processor). That livelihood business was taken up running a small sports apparel store in a mall not far from Lexington (the Lexington of American revolutionary battles to give the correct own and state) where he now lived. Although he was not a professional writer his interest was such that he liked these days with Jimmy Shore, the famous ex-runner running the day to day operations of the store, to perform some of his written work in public at various “open mic” writing (and poetry) jams that have sprouted up in his area.
This “open mic” business was a familiar concept to Jack from the days back in the 1960s when he would go to such events in the coffeehouses around Harvard Square and Beacon Hill to hear amateur folk-singers perfect their acts and try to be recognized as the new voice of their generation, or something like that. For “no singing voice, no musical ear” Jack those were basically cheap date nights if the girl he was with was into folk music. The way most of the "open mics" although they probably called them talent searches then, worked was each performer would sign up to do one, two, maybe three songs depending on how long the list of those wishing to perform happened to be (the places where each performer kicked in a couple of bucks in order to play usually had shorter lists). These singers usually performed in the period in front of the night’s feature who very well might have been somebody who a few weeks before had been noticed by the owner during a pervious "open mic" and asked to do a set of six to sixteen songs depending on the night and the length of the list of players in front of him or her. The featured performer played, unlike the "open mic" people, for the “basket” (maybe a hat) passed around the crowd in the audience and that was the night’s “pay.” A tough racket for those starting out like all such endeavors. The attrition rate was pretty high after the folk minute died down with arrival of other genre like folk rock, heavy rock, and acid rock although you still see a few old folkies around the Square or playing the separate “open mic” folk circuit that also ran through church coffeehouses just like these writing jams.
Jack was not surprised then when Zack told him he would like him to come to hear him perform one of his works at the monthly third Thursday “open mic” at the Congregational Church in Arlington the next town over from Lexington. Zack told Jack that that night he was going to perform something he had written and thought on about Frank Jackman, about what had happened to Frank when he was in the Army during Vietnam War times.
Jack knew almost automatically what Zack was going to do, he would somehow use Bob Dylan’s Masters of War lyrics as part of his presentation. Jack and Zack ( a Vietnam veteran who got “religion” on the anti-war issue while he in the Army and became a fervent anti-war guy after that experience despite his personal problems) had met Frank in 1971 when they were doing some anti-war work among the soldiers at Fort Devens out in Ayer about forty miles west of Boston. Frank had gotten out of the Army several months before and since he was from Nashua in the southern part of New Hampshire not far from Devens and had heard about the G.I. coffeehouse, The Morning Report, where Jack and Zack were working as volunteers he had decided to volunteer to help out as well. Now Frank was a quiet guy, quieter than Jack and Zack anyway, but one night he had told his Army story to a small group of volunteers gathered in the main room of the coffeehouse as they were planning to distribute Daniel Ellsberg’s sensational whistle-blower expose The Pentagon Papers to soldiers at various spots around the base (including as it turned out inside the fort itself with one copy landing on the commanding general’s desk for good measure). He wanted to tell this story since he wanted to explain why he would not be able to go with them if they went inside the gates at Fort Devens.
Jack knew Zack was going to tell Frank’s story so he told Frank he would be there since he had not heard the song or Frank’s story in a long while and had forgotten parts of it. Moreover Zack wanted Jack there for moral support since this night other than the recitation of the lyrics he was going to speak off the cuff rather than his usual reading from some prepared paper.
That night Zack was already in the hall talking to the organizer, Eli Walsh, you may have heard of him since he has written some searing poems about his time in three tours Iraq. Jack felt right at home in this basement section of the church and he probably could have walked around blind-folded since the writing jams were on almost exactly the same model as the old folkie “open mics.” A table as you entered to pay your admission this night three dollars (although the tradition is that no one is turned away for lack of funds) with a kindly woman asking if you intended to perform and direct you to the sign-up sheet if so. Another smaller table with various cookies, snacks, soda, water and glasses for those who wished to have such goodies, and who were asked to leave a donation in the jar on that table if possible. The set-up in the hall this night included a small stage where the performers would present their material slightly above the audience. On the stage a lectern for those who wished to use that for physical support or to read their work from and the ubiquitous simple battery-powered sound system complete with microphone. For the audience a bevy of chairs, mostly mismatched, mostly having seen plenty of use, and mostly uncomfortable. After paying his admission fee he went over to Zack to let him know he was in the audience. Zack told him he was number seven on the list so not to wander too far once the session had begun.
This is the way Zack told the story and why Jack knew there would be some reference to Bob Dylan’s Masters of War that night:
Hi everybody my name is Zack James and I am glad that you all came out this cold night to hear Preston Borden present his moving war poetry and the rest of us to reflect on the main subject of this month’s writing jam-the endless wars that the American government under whatever regime of late has dragged us into, us kicking and screaming to little avail. I want to thank Eli as always for setting this event up every month and for his own thoughtful war poetry. [Some polite applause.] But enough for thanks and all that because tonight I want to recite a poem, well, not really a poem, but lyrics to a song, to a Bob Dylan song, Masters of War, so it might very well be considered a poem in some sense.
You know sometimes, a lot of times, a song, lyrics, a poem for that matter bring back certain associations. You know some song you heard on the radio when you went on your first date, your first dance, your first kiss, stuff like that which is forever etched in your memory and evokes that moment every time you hear it thereafter. Now how this Dylan song came back to me recently is a story in itself.
You remember Eli back in October when we went up to Maine to help the Maine Veterans for Peace on their yearly peace walk that I ran into Susan Rich, the Quaker gal we met up in Freeport who walked with us that day to Portland. [Eli shouted out “yes.”] I had not seen Susan in about forty years before that day, hadn’t seen her since the times we had worked together building up support for anti-war G.I.s out at the Morning Report coffeehouse in Ayer outside Fort Devens up on Route 2 about thirty miles from here. That’s when we met Frank Jackman who is the real subject of my presentation tonight since he is the one who I think about when I think about that song, think about his story and how that song relates to it.
Funny as many Dylan songs as I knew Masters of War, written by Dylan in 1963 I had never heard until 1971. Never heard the lyrics until I met Frank out at Fort Devens where after I was discharged from the Army that year I went to do some volunteer anti-war G.I. work at the coffeehouse outside the base in Army town Ayer. Frank too was a volunteer, had heard about the place somehow I forget how, who had grown up in Nashua up in southern New Hampshire and after he was discharged from the Army down at Fort Dix in New Jersey came to volunteer just like me and my old friend Jack Callahan who is sitting in the audience tonight. Now Frank was a quiet guy didn’t talk much about his military service but he made the anti-war soldiers who hung out there at night and on weekends feel at ease. One night thought he felt some urge to tell his story, tell why he thought it was unwise for him to participate in an anti-war action we were planning around the base. We were going to pass out copies of Daniel Ellsberg’s explosive whistle-blower expose The Pentagon Papers to soldiers at various location around the fort and as it turned out on the base. The reason that Frank had balked at the prospect of going into the fort was that as part of his discharge paperwork was attached a statement that he was never to go on a military installation again. We all were startled by that remark, right Jack? [Jack nods agreement.]
And that night the heroic, our kind of heroic, Frank Jackman told us about the hows and whys of his Army experience. Frank had been drafted like a ton of guys back then, like me, and had allowed himself to be drafted in 1968 at the age of nineteen not being vociferously anti-war and not being aware then of the option of not taking the subsequent induction. After about three week down at Fort Dix, the main basic training facility for trainees coming from the Northeast then, he knew two things-he had made a serious mistake by allowing himself to be drafted and come hell or high water he was not going to fight against people he had no quarrel with in Vietnam. Of course the rigors of basic training and being away from home, away from anybody who could help him do he knew not what then kept him quiet and just waiting. Once basic was over and he got his Advanced Infantry Training assignment also at Fort Dix which was to be an infantryman at a time when old Uncle Sam only wanted infantrymen in the rice paddles and jungles of Vietnam things came to a head.
After a few weeks in AIT he got a three day weekend pass which allowed him to go legally off the base and he used that time to come up to Boston, or really Cambridge because what he was looking for was help to file an conscientious objector application and he knew the Quakers were historically the ones who would know about going about that process. That is ironically where Susan Rich comes in again, although indirectly this time, since Frank went to the Meeting House on Brattle Street where they were doing draft and G.I. resistance counseling and Susan was a member of that Meeting although she had never met him at that time. He was advised by one of the Quaker counselors that he could submit a C.O. application in the military, which he had previously not been sure was possible since nobody told anybody anything about that in the military, when he got back to Fort Dix but just then, although they were better later, the odds were stacked against him since he had already accepted induction. So he went back, put in his application, took a lot of crap from the lifers and officers in his company after that and little support, mainly indifference, from his fellow trainees. He still had to go through the training, the infantry training though and although he had taken M-16 rifle training in basic he almost balked at continuing to fire weapons especially when it came to machine guns. He didn’t balk but in the end that was not a big deal since fairly shortly after that his C.O. application was rejected although almost all those who interviewed him in the process though he was “sincere” in his beliefs. That point becomes important later.
Frank, although he knew his chances of being discharged as a C.O. were slim since he had based his application on his Catholic upbringing and more general moral and ethical grounds. The Catholic Church which unlike Quakers and Mennonites and the like who were absolutely against war held to a just war theory, Vietnam being mainly a just war in the Catholic hierarchy’s opinion. But Frank was sincere, more importantly, he was determined to not got to war despite his hawkish family and his hometown friends’, some who had already served, served in Vietnam too, scorn and lack of support. So he went back up to Cambridge on another three day pass to get some advice, which he actually didn’t take in the end or rather only partially took up which had been to get a lawyer they would recommend and fight the C.O. denial in Federal court even though that was also still a long shot then.
Frank checked with the lawyer alright, Steve Brady, who had been radicalized by the war and was offering his services on a sliding scale basis to G.I.s since he also had the added virtue of having been in the JAG in the military and so knew some of the ropes of the military legal system, and legal action was taken but Frank was one of those old time avenging Jehovah types like John Brown or one of those guys and despite being a Catholic rather than a high holy Protestant which is the usual denomination for avenging angels decided to actively resist the military. And did it in fairly simple way when you think about it. One Monday morning when the whole of AIT was on the parade field for their weekly morning report ceremony Frank came out of his barracks with his civilian clothes on and carrying a handmade sign which read “Bring the Troops Home Now!” That sign was simply but his life got a lot more complicated after that. In the immediate sense that meant he was pulled down on the ground by two lifer sergeants and brought to the Provost Marshal’s office since they were not sure that some dippy-hippie from near-by New York City might be pulling a stunt. When they found out that he was a soldier they threw him into solitary in the stockade.
For his offenses Frank was given a special court-martial which meant he faced six month maximum sentence which a panel of officers at his court-martial ultimately sentenced him to after a seven day trial which Steve Brady did his best to try to make into an anti-war platform but given the limitation of courts for such actions was only partially successful. After that six months was up minus some good time Frank was assigned to a special dead-beat unit waiting further action either by the military or in the federal district court in New Jersey. Still in high Jehovah form the next Monday morning after he was released he went out to that same parade field in civilian clothes carrying another homemade sign “Bring The Troops Home Now!” and he was again manhandled by another pair of lifer sergeants and this time thrown directly into solitary in the stockade since they knew who they were dealing with by then. And again he was given a special court-martial and duly sentenced by another panel of military officers to the six months maximum.
Frank admitted at that point he was in a little despair at the notion that he might have to keep doing the same action over and over again for eternity. Well he wound up serving almost all of that second sex month sentence but then he got a break. That is where listening to the Quakers a little to get legal advice did help. See what Steve Brady, like I said an ex-World War II Army JAG officer turned anti-war activist lawyer, did was take the rejection of his C.O. application to Federal District Court in New Jersey on a writ of habeas corpus arguing that since all Army interviewers agreed Frank was “sincere” that it had been arbitrary and capricious of the Army to turn down his application. And given that the United States Supreme Court and some lower court decisions had by then had expanded who could be considered a C.O. beyond the historically recognized groupings and creeds the cranky judge in the lower court case agreed and granted that writ of habeas corpus. Frank was let out with an honorable discharge, ironically therefore entitled to all veteran’s benefits but with the stipulation that he never go onto a military base again under penalty of arrest and trial. Whether that could be enforced as a matter of course he said he did not want to test since he was hardily sick of military bases in any case.
So where does Bob Dylan’s Masters of War come into the picture. Well as you know, or should know every prisoner, every convicted prisoner, has the right to make a statement in his or her defense during the trial or at the sentencing phase. Frank at both his court-martials rose up and recited Bob Dylan’s Masters of War for the record. So for all eternity, or a while anyway, in some secret recess of the Army archives (and of the federal courts too) there is that defiant statement of a real hero of the Vietnam War. Nice right?
Here is what had those bloated military officers on Frank’s court-martial board seeing red and ready to swing him from the highest gallow, yeah, swing him high.
Masters Of War-Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin’ But build to destroy You play with my world Like it’s your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion As young people’s blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud
You’ve thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain’t worth the blood That runs in your veins
How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I’m young You might say I’m unlearned But there’s one thing I know Though I’m younger than you Even Jesus would never Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die And your death’ll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I’ll watch while you’re lowered Down to your deathbed And I’ll stand o’er your grave ’Til I’m sure that you’re dead
