The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967- An Encore -Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967- An Encore -Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Scene: Brought to mind by the cover art on some deep fogged memory producing, maybe acid-etched flashback memory at the time, accompanying CD booklet tossed aside on the coffee table by a guy from the old days, the old New York University days, Jeff Mackey, who had been visiting Sarah, Josh Breslin’s wife of the moment. Jeff had just placed the CD on the CD player, the intricacies of fine-tuned down-loading from YouTube beyond anybody’s stoned capacity just then and so the “primitive” technology (stoned as in “turned on,” doped up, high if you like just like in the old days as well although Josh had gone to State U not NYU but the times were such that such transactions were universal and the terms “pass the bong” and “don’t bogart that join” had passed without comment). Don’t take that “wife of the moment” too seriously either since that was a standing joke between Sarah and Josh (not Joshua, Joshua was dad, the late Joshua Breslin, Jr.) since in a long life they had managed five previous  marriages (three by him, two by her) and scads of children and two scads of grandchildren (who had better not see this piece since grandma and grandpa have collectively expended many jaws-full hours of talk  about the danger of demon drugs, the devil’s work even if only with a half-hearted sincerity since they fully expected that those younger kids like their own kids would experiment, would "puff the magic dragon" and then move on).

When Josh had picked up that tossed aside booklet he noticed a  wispy, blue-jeaned, blouse hanging off one shoulder, bare-foot, swirling mass of red hair, down home Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night. (The Generation of "68 designation a term of art among the brethren still standing who had faced down that seminal year in the history of the 1960s, some calling it the ebb tide year although Josh had pushed that forward over the years to 1971 the year when they had utterly failed to shut down the government if it would not shut the Vietnam War.) The woman maybe kin to Janis, maybe not, but certainly brethren who looked uncannily like his first ex-wife, Laura, who had taught him many little sex things learned from a trip to India and close attention to the Kama Sutra which he had passed on to everybody thereafter including Sarah. And no again don’t take that wistful though about Laura as anything but regret since their civil wars had passed a long time before and beside Laura had not been heard from since the time she went down to Rio and was presumably shacked up with some dope king or diamond king or something probably still earning her keep with those little India tricks. (Strange to think that straight-laced Forest Lawn-raised Laura knew all the tricks that some courtesans would blush at sine a look at her would say virgin until marriage. No way. 

Still looking at the tantalizing artwork Josh thought of the time of our time, passed. Of wistful women belting out songs, band backed-up and boozed-up, probably Southern Comfort if the dough was tight and there had been ginger ale or ice to cut the sweet taste or if it was late and if the package store was short of some good cutting whiskey, but singing, no, better evoking, yes, evoking barrelhouse down-trodden black empresses and queens from somewhere beyond speaking troubled times, a no good man taking up with that no good best girlfriend  of hers who drew a bee-line to him when that empress advertised his charms, no job, no prospect of a job and then having to go toe to toe with that damn rent collector man on that flattened damn mattress that kept springing holes, maybe no roof over a head and walking the streets picking up tricks to pass the time, no pocket dough, no prospects and a ton of busted dreams in some now forgotten barrelhouse, chittlin’ circuit bowling alley complete with barbecued ribs smoking out back or in a downtown “colored” theater. Or the echo of that scene, okay. Jesus, maybe he had better kick that dope thing before he actually did start heading to Rio.

*******

Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some merry prankster yellow brick road bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or someplace like that, maybe Russia he was not sure of the geography all he knew was that he had made a wag wiggle a little for his indiscretion)  was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, weary even of hanging out with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride but in a time when everyone in youth nation was shedding "slave" names the moniker of the day or week was the way that you identified most fellow travelers-that was just the way it was and kind of nice when you thought about it-wouldn't you rather be Moonbeam than some Susan something), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish up some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising.

Yeah, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do, the Prince mused to himself. Chuckled really, term paper stuff was just not his “thing” right then. Hell, he had dropped out of State U, dropped out of Laura Perkin’s life, dropped out of everything to chase the Western arroyo desert ocean washed dream that half his generation was pursuing just then.

Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, 1967 version to be exact, autumns of drugs, strange brews of hyper-colored experience drugs and high shamanic medicine man aztec druid flame throws, winters of Paseo Robles brown hills discontent, brown rolling hills until he sickened of rolling, the color brown, hills, slopes, plains, everything, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of Martin Luther King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim former high school runner’s frame could not afford.

Now the chickens had come home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed, after graduating from high school, that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, the Prince is nothing but a Mainiac, Olde Saco section, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though before she went back to her golden-haired surfer boy back down in Carlsbad (his temperature rose even now every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually and she had never heard of the Kama Sutra) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.

What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.

Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Miss Ruby, as he called her as a little bait, a little come on bait, playing on her somewhere south drawl, although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message).

Josh, all throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. Guys like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, even a gal like Wanda Jackson, when they were hungry, and that hunger not only carried them to the stars but slaked some weird post-World War II, red scare, cold war hunger in guys like Josh Breslin although he never, never in a million years would have articulated it that way back then. That was infernal Captain Crunch’s work (Captain was the “owner” of the “bus” and a story all his own but that is for another time) always trying to put things in historical perspective or the exact ranking in some mythical pantheon that he kept creating (and recreating especially after a “dip” of Kool-Aid, LSD for the squares, okay).

But back to Ruby love. He got a surprise one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and he felt was meant to be a little coquettish and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.

What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace that someone, Bonnie Raitt or Maria Muldaur, had found in old age out in some boondock church social or something, mad Bessie Smith squeezed dry, freeze-dried by some no account Saint Louis man and left wailing, empty bed, gin house wailing ever after, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie, the queen of the double entendre, sex version, with her butcher, baker, candlestick-maker men, doing, well doing the do, okay, and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog made just for her that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all a full-blast Piece Of My Heart.

Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey just up the road from the Big Sur merry prankster yellow bus camp, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting some work at the Monterrey Pop Festival held each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl (or maybe some cheap gin or rotgut Southern Comfort, cheap and all the in between rage for those saving their dough for serious drugs).

Ya just a wisp of a girl, wearing spattered blue-jeans, some damn moth-eaten tee-shirt, haphazardly tie-dyed by someone on a terminal acid trip, barefoot, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma, (although he had seen a fair share of the breed in Fryeburg Fair Maine) who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster.

Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. And maybe some sweet sidle promise, who knows in that alcohol blaze around three in the morning. All Josh knew was this woman, almost girlish except for her sharp tongue and that eternal hardship voice, that no good man, no luck except bad luck voice, that spoke of a woman’s sorrow back to primordial times, had that certain something, that something hunger that he recognized in young Elvis and the guys. And that something Josh guessed would take them over the hump into that new day they were trying to create on the bus, and a thousand other buses like it. What a night, what a blues singer.

The next day Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that just slightly off-hand look in her eye that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him, and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either, whoever that dull-wit was) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August, sign up for State U., and still be okay but that he had better grab Ruby now while he could.

*From The Pen Of V.I. Lenin- The Revolution of 1905

Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

Solidarity with Class-War Prisoners! From The Partisan Defense Committee

Workers Vanguard No. 1101	2 December 2016

Solidarity with Class-War Prisoners!

(Quote of the Week)

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Partisan Defense Committee’s annual Holiday Appeal raises funds for its program of sending monthly stipends to class-war prisoners. The PDC’s stipend program revives a tradition of the early American Communist Party’s International Labor Defense. James P. Cannon was the ILD’s first secretary, a Communist Party leader and later the founder of American Trotskyism. In motivating support for those who have been imprisoned for taking the side of the working class and oppressed, he stressed that such support is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity.

The New York Times, the organ of big business, is making its annual plea for contributions for Christmas to the “100 Neediest Cases.” Other capitalist papers and organizations are conducting similar drives. The men, women and children of the working class, who have been on the rack of capitalist exploitation and are now dropped into the abyss of misery and poverty, are chosen and classified by these arch hypocrites—so their sanctimonious appeal can be made to the comfortable capitalists, to soften the bitterness of these few workers with the insult of charity, and to salve their own conscience by acts of “generosity.”

This horrible farce is annually repeated in scores of other cities.

The militant workers have nothing but hatred and contempt for such appeals and drives. This year, therefore, they are again following the world-wide custom that has developed in the ranks of the working class for many years. It is the custom of raising a special fund for the men in prison for the labor cause and their wives and children, of transforming the hypocritical spirit of Christmas into the spirit of solidarity with the class-war fighters behind bars.

The International Labor Defense has already started a campaign for a Christmas Fund for the men in prison, and their dependents who suffer on the outside. The labor militants throughout the entire country are working to collect this fund. Nowhere has the appeal or the response been made on the basis of charity. Everywhere has been emphasized the duty of those who are outside toward the men on the inside....

The men in prison are still a part of the living class movement. The Christmas Fund drive of International Labor Defense is a means of informing them that the workers of America have not forgotten their duty toward the men to whom we are all linked by bonds of solidarity. It is the Christmas drive of Labor and must have its generous support!

—James P. Cannon, “A Christmas Fund of Our Own,” Daily Worker, 17 October 1927, reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (Pathfinder Press, 1973)

Independence for Catalonia and the Basque Country! For Workers Republics! For Class Struggle Against Spanish Prison House of Peoples!

Workers Vanguard No. 1112	19 May 2017

Independence for Catalonia and the Basque Country! For Workers Republics!

For Class Struggle Against Spanish Prison House of Peoples!

The following article is a translation of an April supplement issued by the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), and distributed on May Day in Barcelona.

Braving the winter chill of a Monday morning, 40,000 demonstrators turned out in Barcelona to march with Artur Màs and two codefendants at the start of their trial in February. They were facing charges for defying Spain’s Constitutional Court by promoting independence for Catalonia. The February 6 march was full of estelades, the Catalan flag—inspired by the Cuban and Puerto Rican flags—which was banned from being displayed on city council buildings in Catalonia by the conservative Popular Party (PP) government of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy. Even the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) outrageously fined the Blaugrana (blue-and-garnet) Barça soccer team last year because enthusiastic Barcelona fans waved estelades at a UEFA tournament game. We demand: Madrid hands off Màs and his codefendants! Flying the estelada is not a crime!

The Spanish state’s intensification of anti-Catalan repression has set off massive protests in Catalonia in favor of independence. In 2010, a million and a half people poured into the streets of central Barcelona to protest against the overturn of key articles of Catalonia’s autonomy statute. This past September, over a million pro-independence demonstrators once again took to the streets of the region on the Diada [The National Day of Catalonia].

Eighty years ago, Barcelona was the center of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. As we noted in “Trotskyism vs. Popular Frontism in the Spanish Civil War” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009): “The Barcelona May Days of 1937 marked the high point of a decade of revolution and counterrevolution in Spain that began with the fall of the Primo de Rivera military dictatorship in 1930 and the monarchy a year later and ended with the crushing of the Republic by General Francisco Franco in 1939.” Catalan workers were in the vanguard of the struggle for socialist revolution, but decades of bloody repression under Franco pushed the national question to the fore in both Catalonia and the Basque Country.

Catalans and Basques are today engaged in a struggle for national liberation from the capitalist state of Spain. For decades, the PP of Mariano Rajoy has taken turns with the equally chauvinist social democrats of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) in administering capitalist rule. Currently, the PP is part of a minority government that has managed to stay in power by wielding the longstanding agreement among all major parties to hold the Basque and Catalan minority nations forcibly within the borders of Spain. Such is the fundamental content of the chauvinist, anti-democratic Spanish constitution of 1978, which established the monarchy as bonapartist overlord. The struggle for the liberation of the oppressed nations is in the interest of the proletariat! Every blow struck against the chauvinism of the Spanish bourgeois state would benefit workers everywhere!

The Catalan and Basque nations extend to the north, across the border with France, where the chauvinist French state also keeps them forcibly oppressed without any [national] rights. The motor force of the movement for independence comes from the south. If the Basques and/or Catalans obtained independence from Spain, it is very likely that their conationals on the French side would follow them. In any case, we defend the right of self-determination of the Basque and Catalan Northern provinces.

Language is a central element in the national identity of Catalans and Basques. The chauvinist Castilian rulers have tried time and again to exterminate the Catalan and Basque languages and impose Spanish, the language of the oppressor. From the late 1930s to the late 1970s, ferocious Francoist repression meant that if you were Catalan or Basque, the simple act of speaking your own language in public could land you in jail. Catalan schoolchildren were instructed by nuns to “speak Christian,” that is, castellà (Castilian, aka Spanish), as it is called by Catalans. The fact that both the Catalan and Basque languages have survived centuries of domination by Castile is evidence of the desire of these peoples to exist as distinct nations and of their success in assimilating immigrants into their societies.

The “Constitution of ’78” laid the basis for limited regional self-rule. A few years after Catalonia managed to wrest a few autonomy rights from Madrid, the regional government began to introduce Catalan as the language of instruction in public schools at all levels. Today over ten million people, including 38,000 in France, speak Catalan, roughly the same amount of speakers as Swedish or Greek.

In 2010, the Spanish Constitutional Court gutted a 2006 Catalan autonomy Estatut [Statute]. It ruled, among other things, that Catalonia is part of “the one and indivisible Spanish nation” and declared that Catalan could not be the “preferred language” in Catalan administration, media and public schooling. This past November the Constitutional Court acquired new enforcement power—for example, to reinstitute Spanish as the language of instruction in public education. Since 2010, Madrid has increasingly imposed the use of Spanish in all areas of daily life. Penalties for failing to provide a Spanish-language label on a commercial product in Catalonia can run from 15,000 to 1.2 million euros. In 2016 alone, some 64 new regulations were introduced requiring the use of Spanish in Catalonia, subjecting daily life to a whole series of instances of language repression. The question of language is also very important in France, where Basques and Catalans have absolutely no national or linguistic rights. For the right of all Basques and Catalans to study in their own languages! No privileges for Spanish or French!

No Faith in Catalan Bourgeoisie!

Rajoy and his PP backers have increasingly used the Madrid-dominated court system against Catalan independentistes. In November, the Constitutional Court granted itself the power to suspend public officials—that is, Catalans—without a hearing. Currently, more than 400 Catalan government functionaries, mayors and municipal councillors face charges in various courts. Although his sentence is on hold pending appeal, Artur Màs was found guilty, fined 36,500 euros and barred from seeking public office for two years. The Constitutional Court ruled that Artur Màs “disobeyed” its ban on convoking a 2014 independence referendum, which was conducted while he was president of the regional Generalitat government of Catalonia—a referendum in which nearly 90 percent voted for independence for Catalonia! Madrid has also charged Carme Forcadell, speaker of the Generalitat’s Parlament, with the “crime” of allowing debate on a proposal for a second independence referendum, a proposal endorsed by the majority of representatives in the Parlament and by current Generalitat president Carles Puigdemont. In February, the Constitutional Court annulled a resolution by the Parlament to convoke the referendum in 2017.

Rajoy’s government recently announced that it would prefer to seal off the public schools in Catalonia rather than permit their use as polling places in the event the Generalitat tries to hold the referendum. This was followed by an ominous threat to use the Spanish constitution to revoke what remains of the Generalitat’s autonomy powers.

Catalonia produces more than 25 percent of Spain’s exports, with a per capita GDP of 28,900 euros in 2015. The Basque Country has the highest GDP per capita in Spain, with 30,500 euros, and produces 8.8 percent of exports. The Spanish ruling class knows full well that its small prison house of peoples would be reduced to practically nothing without its two most profitable regions, and hence will not permit a peaceful secession of Catalonia and the Basque Country. It’s clear that as the clash between Catalonia and Spain intensifies, a military intervention by the vicious overlord against the oppressed nation could be posed. Such a showdown would immediately push antagonistic class interests to the fore. Only the working class, mobilized independently at the head of all the poor and oppressed, has the social power to fight for the sovereignty of the minority nations against Madrid’s hardline chauvinism.

But, in fear of the insurgent proletariat, the significant section of the Catalan bourgeoisie that prefers national independence would throw themselves unhesitatingly into the arms of their Madrid counterparts. Ultimately, the capitalist rulers of both the great-power and minority nations will unite in defense of their class privileges against those whom they exploit for profit—the workers of Spain, Catalonia and the Basque Country alike. It would be suicidal for the Catalan proletariat and oppressed to rely on the Catalan bourgeoisie in the fight for national liberation.

We call on all opponents of national oppression to defend the pro-Catalan independence CUP (Popular Unity Candidacy) against repression from the Spanish state. A number of the 16 CUP mayors and 372 CUP city council members who hold office in Catalan municipalities face trial for flying the estelada from town halls and for opening city offices on official Spanish state holidays. Five CUP members have been accused of the medieval-era crime of “insulting the king” for burning photos of Spain’s King Felipe VI during last year’s Diada! Since then, the CUP has been targeted by a PP criminalization campaign intended to drive away its supporters.

The well-known Basque separatist Arnaldo Otegi was freed last year after six and a half years in prison for his leading role in attempting to refound the banned left-nationalist Batasuna party. Prohibited from running for public office, Otegi had also been found guilty of insulting the Spanish king. His one-year sentence was later commuted after no less than the European Union’s Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg gingerly declared that his penalty was “disproportionate” to the crime. Under the current Spanish penal code, anyone who “slanders or insults the King or Queen or any of their ancestors or descendants” will be sentenced to six months to two years in prison. And now, any supposed “threat” against the monarch constitutes terrorism. For example, Valtonyc, a rapper from the island of Mallorca, was recently accused of insulting the king and inciting terrorism, and has outrageously been sent to prison for three and a half years. Down with the Spanish monarchy and its bonapartist powers of government!

Laws against insulting the monarchy only serve to strengthen Spain’s repressive bourgeois state apparatus, aimed first and foremost against the proletariat. Draconian “anti-terrorism” laws have been harshly and relentlessly used against pro-independence Basques. Herri Batasuna’s founding leader was brutally assassinated in 1984 by a GAL (Antiterrorist Liberation Groups) death squad formed under the direction of the post-Franco Spanish government of the PSOE’s Felipe Gonzalez.

The working class throughout Spain has a vital interest in opposing the persecution of the CUP and all pro-independence Basques and Catalans as an act of opposition to national oppression and as part of fighting to defend its own right to organize and to struggle. The CUP electoral coalition—self-avowedly, if falsely, labeled “anti-capitalist”—plays a critical role in maintaining Puigdemont at the head of the Generalitat regional government because its ten (out of 135) deputies give him the majority he requires in the Catalan Parlament. But the petty-bourgeois CUP gets no reward from the Catalan ruling class: The Generalitat endorsed the prosecution of the photo-burning cupaires [CUP supporters], stating that it is indeed a crime to burn photos of the Madrid monarch! Drop all charges against the CUP nationalists! Madrid: hands off the CUP!

Down With the EU, Enemy of National Rights!

Following the 2008 worldwide Great Recession, the European Union has imposed economic austerity on Spain in return for loans. As a result, youth unemployment in Catalonia today is a whopping 32 percent, the number of those unemployed for more than two years has alarmingly increased, and 11 percent of employed Catalan workers fall below Spain’s poverty line. Nevertheless, in the face of Madrid’s threats, Puigdemont as well as Màs—who, in fact, administered the EU’s austerity measures in Catalonia—go begging for support at the feet of their capitalist class cohorts in the EU. Following his March conviction, Màs declared, “We will appeal in Spain and then take the case to European courts, if we need to.” In mid January, Puigdemont (who rules in coalition with the bourgeois-nationalist Republican Left Party) delivered an appeal for EU support for a Catalan independence referendum at a forum held in the EU parliament building in Brussels. The hall was overflowing with...hundreds of Catalan invitees, and was snubbed by EU officials.

The EU unwaveringly backs the Spanish bourgeois state, notwithstanding the false hopes of the Catalan bourgeoisie. [German chancellor Angela] Merkel herself made that clear back in 2015 when she declared her position on Catalonia to be “very similar” to Rajoy’s. The EU is a deadly enemy of the national rights of the oppressed. Just ask any immiserated Greek worker who has necessarily been a firsthand witness to the EU strangulation of Greek national sovereignty. We say: Down with the euro and the EU! The EU is an unstable consortium of capitalist countries that works to increase profits by squeezing the workers throughout Europe, while its dominant members—Germany and, to a lesser extent, France and Britain—use it to further subordinate the weaker, dependent European countries. Freedom from the Spanish yoke lies in the hands of the multiracial, multiethnic proletariat of Catalonia against the European Union.

Spanish dock workers pointed the way forward when they struck an initial blow against the EU and Rajoy in March. The EU’s Court of Justice declared back in 2014 that the labor situation in all ports in Spain—where stevedoring workers are unionized, including in the ports of Catalonia and the Basque Country—violated EU rules on “free enterprise” (read, free of unions). To enforce its diktats, the EU imposed 23 million euros in fines on Spain and then in March added a daily penalty of 134,000 euros for noncompliance. The Rajoy government issued a decree to force harsh conditions of compliance with EU rules upon this strategic union workforce, which handles 80 percent of Spain’s imports and about 65 percent of its exports. In response, the Spanish port workers union Coordinadora Estatal de Trabajadores del Mar (CETM) began mobilizing for nationwide port strikes in February and March with widely publicized plans for solidarity actions by other longshore unions around the world. Faced with the port strikes, a majority of members of the Spanish Congress refused to approve the union-busting decree and handed Rajoy’s minority government a stinging defeat, the first time a government decree has been voted down by Congress since 1979!

The battle is not over. The EU’s aim is to eliminate union labor from the ports and slash wages, and the punitive fines against Spain are accumulating to enforce this diktat. The port workers’ struggle underlines the nature of the EU as an imperialist cartel bent on imposing ever-greater exploitation on the European working class. Union dockers in many EU countries are today fighting parallel attempts to consign shipboard lashing work to cruelly exploited and non-union seamen from the Third World. Harbor workers in Germany and some of the other EU countries whose ports also violate EU “free enterprise” regulations may soon confront EU-led attacks on their unions, especially if these regulations succeed in Spain.

The Spanish dockers are waging a fight that is crucial to the entire European proletariat. Victory requires a fight against the union bureaucrats who are capitulating to the EU’s leaders. Thus, the International Dockworkers Council federation headquartered in Spain calls “for complying with the ruling of the European Court of Justice.” The other labor lieutenants of capital in the workers movement who lead the hegemonic CETM port union are willing to betray the existence of the union in exchange for job and pension protection for the current workforce. CETM head Antolin Goya emphasizes that “the continued employment of the current port workers” is one of the “issues that the new code should regulate.” Port workers of Europe: It is urgently necessary to wield your mighty social power against the EU and Spanish government attack on the CETM and all the unionized dockers of Spain!

Populists and Social-Chauvinists Oppose Catalan Independence

The upstart bourgeois Podemos [“We Can”] is a party of Castilian chauvinists in the guise of “anti-establishment” populism. Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has called for a referendum on Catalan independence to be conducted throughout Spain, which would only mean condemning the Catalan nation to continued oppression by Madrid. The bulk of the Spanish left shares this chauvinist outlook, such as the Spanish Communist Party, now a lesser partner in the “Unidos Podemos” [“United We Can”] electoral bloc with Podemos, as well as the several and various Stalinist splits and offspring of the Communist Party. (See, in Spanish, “Primero de Mayo en Barcelona—Trotskismo vs. reformismo sobre la cuestión nacional,” Espartaco No. 46, October 2016.)

This chauvinist outlook is also shared by the fake Trotskyists of Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left), followers of the late British pseudo-Trotskyist Ted Grant, who have recently signed a unity statement with Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International, which is affiliated with Socialist Alternative in the U.S. Their constant pledges to fight “for the right of self-determination” of Catalonia and the Basque Country notwithstanding, Izquierda Revolucionaria is actually opposed to the independence of the oppressed nations of Spain. Thus, in a 2014 pamphlet (“¡Por el derecho a la autodeterminación, por el socialismo!”) devoted to the national question in Catalonia, the Spanish Grantites declared: “The task of the workers movement, there as here, in Euskal Herria and Catalunya, in the Spanish state as a whole and in Europe, is not to build new states and erect new borders, but to build socialism on a global scale.” Behind this sweet talk of “socialism” is a chauvinist program.

Genuine Trotskyists are for independence here and now, without making the socialist revolution a precondition, while understanding that the struggle for national liberation is a motor force in the fight for workers rule. Not so Izquierda Revolucionaria, which counterposes to the call for independence for Catalonia and the Basque Country the call for a “Federal Socialist Republic” of Spain! So much for “self-determination”! And what could the arch-reformist Izquierda Revolucionaria possibly mean by “socialism”? While they spill much ink preaching “class independence” vis-à-vis the Catalan bourgeoisie, to them the bourgeois populist and chauvinist Podemos is nothing less than a lever “for socialist transformation”! (El Militante online, 3 February).

The U.S.-based Internationalist Group (IG) acts as a tool of the Castilian bourgeoisie. The IG in fact supports the national oppression of Catalans, without even pretending to support the right of self-determination. Arguing for the sacred unity of Spain, the IG wrote:

“But not only is Catalonia the richest part of Spain, whose bourgeoisie wishes to stop subsidizing poorer southern regions; not only would independence mean separating off one of the most militant sections of the working class; but much if not most of the industrial workers do not speak Catalan, many coming from Andalucía.”

— “For a Scottish Workers Republic in a Socialist Federation of the British Isles” (September 2014)

The IG concludes that it’s Catalan independence that would “discriminate” against Spaniards! The oppression of an entire nation by the Castilian bourgeoisie is not a concern for these “Grandees of Spain.” According to the IG, on account of its historic class-consciousness and militancy, the Catalan proletariat has foresworn any right to ever fight to liberate itself from the Castilian yoke. The IG implicitly supports the privileges of castellà and ignorantly denies the fact that the majority of workers in Catalonia speak Catalan, while in passing portraying Catalans as cheap and racist—the current chauvinist propaganda of the PP.

The independence of Catalonia would greatly advance the struggle for independence of the Basque Country, and that of their respective conationals on the other side of the French border. It would shake up monarchial Spain, whose unity the IG respects so much, and would strike a blow against the EU imperialist consortium, which the IG also respects very much.

In determined opposition to the vile great-power chauvinism of such pretenders to Trotskyism and on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution led by Leon Trotsky and V.I. Lenin, the International Communist League again emphasizes the class-struggle perspective that was key to the October 1917 victory of the workers in the Russian prison house of peoples:

“The Marxist solution of the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilise all democratic institutions and aspirations in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory....

“In our civil war against the bourgeoisie, we shall unite and merge the nations not by the force of the ruble, not by the force of the truncheon, not by violence, but by voluntary agreement and solidarity of the working people against the exploiters. For the bourgeoisie the proclamation of equal rights for all nations has become a deception. For us it will be the truth that will facilitate and accelerate the winning over of all nations. Without effectively organised democratic relations between nations—and, consequently, without freedom of secession—civil war of the workers and working people generally of all nations against the bourgeoisie is impossible.”

— V.I. Lenin, “Reply to P. Kievsky (Y. Pyatakov)” (August-September 1916)

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-On The Late Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider”

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-On The Late Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider”

Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. In the times of this 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20^th of this year.   

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. He would have gone crazy seeing all the crew deserting the sinking U.S.S. Trump with guys like fired FBI Director Comey going to Capitol Hill and saying out the emperor has no clothes and would not know the truth if it grabbed him by the throat. Every day would be a feast day. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit    would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  

DVD Review

Easy Rider, starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, directed by Dennis Hopper, 1969

In the recent Associated Press obituary for the late actor and director, Dennis Hooper, is quoted as believing that, for him, the 1969 counter-cultural classic motorcycle film that he directed, “Easy Rider”, was more a statement about the political landscape of the times than a male-bonding biker “road” movie. I agree with him, or at least that is how I have always viewed the film. The subjects of drugs, using and selling, dressing for “hippie" success, the hard road of rural communal living (or urban communal living, for that matter), and trying to cope with the “squares” and “rednecks” were all in a day’s work back in the days for those of us committed to “seeking a newer world.”

In that sense “Easy Rider” is a very, very different road trip from that of the literary one in Jack Kerouac’s 1957 “On The Road” (although the “action” of that book actually took place in the late 1940s). That small generational difference in time probably in cultural time was a matter of different epochs. The action of “On The Road” speaks to an almost subterranean escape from the bleakness of American conformity in the immediate post-World War II period behind the backs of the "squares". The bikers, Fonda and Hopper (Wyatt and Billy, alright), in “Easy Rider” are up front and public about their “making and doing” , as reflected the change in mores of their times as they confronted their version of American conformity in the 1960s. In the end they lost that very public battle, and we have been fighting a rearguard series of “culture war” battles ever since. But watch this film to get a slice of 1960s Americana. (Did we really wear that stuff and get all crazy like that? Yes, we did. Although under oath I will plead the 5th.) And if you are too young to know some of the references just ask mother and father (or the grandparents, ouch!). They WILL know.

Note: The late Doctor Gonzo”, journalist Hunter Thompson, rather eloquently in HIS countercultural classic, “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”, mentioned toward the end of that fearsome saga that sometime in the late 1960s he could almost see the high tide of the movement ebbing before his eyes signaling the end of all those fierce dreams that we had of that “newer world” and the beginning of the approach of the “night of the long knives.” “Easy Rider” is the cinematic take on that proposition

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967 -*When “Doctor Gonzo” Was "King Of The Hill'-The Master Journalism Of Hunter S. Thompson-"The Great Shark Hunt"

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967 -*When “Doctor Gonzo” Was "King Of The Hill'-The Master Journalism Of Hunter S. Thompson-"The Great Shark Hunt"

Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. In the times of this 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20^th of this year.   

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. He would have gone crazy seeing all the crew deserting the sinking U.S.S. Trump with guys like fired FBI Director Comey going to Capitol Hill and saying out the emperor has no clothes and would not know the truth if it grabbed him by the throat. Every day would be a feast day. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit    would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  

Book Review

The Great Shark Hunt; Gonzo Papers Volume One, Hunter S. Thompson, 1978

In a review of Hunter Thompson's later journalistic work compiled under the title , Song Of The Doomed, a retrospective sampling of his works through the early 1990s, many of the early pieces which appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine during its more radical, hipper phase, I noted the following points that are useful to repost here in reviewing The Great Shark Hunt, an earlier, similar compilation of his journalistic pieces:

“Generally the most the trenchant social criticism, commentary and analysis complete with a prescriptive social program ripe for implementation has been done by thinkers and writers who work outside the realm of bourgeois society, notably socialists, like Karl Marx. Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky and other less radical progressive thinkers. Bourgeois society rarely allows itself, in self-defense if nothing else, to be skewered by trenchant criticism from within. This is particularly true when it comes from a man of big, high life appetites, a known dope fiend, a furious wild man gun freak, and all-around edge city lifestyle addict like the late, massively lamented, massively lamented in this quarter in any case, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Nevertheless, although he was far, very far, from any thought of a socialist solution to society's current problems and would reject such a designation, I think out of hand, we could travel part of the way with him. We saw him as a kindred spirit. He was not one of us-but he was one of us. All honor to him for pushing the envelope of mad truth-seeking journalism in new directions and for his pinpricks at the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. Such men are dangerous.

I am not sure whether at the end of the day Hunter Thompson saw himself, or wanted to been seen, as a voice, or the voice, of his generation but he would not be an unworthy candidate. In any case, his was not the voice of the generation of 1968, my generation, being just enough older to have been formed by an earlier, less forgiving milieu, coming of adult age in the drab Cold War, red scare, conformist 1950s that not even the wildly popular Mad Men can resurrect as a time which honored fruitful and edgy work, except on the coastal margins of society. His earlier writings show that effect. Nevertheless, only a few, and with time it seems fewer in each generation, allow themselves to search for some kind of truth even if they cannot go the whole distance. This compilation under review is a hodgepodge of articles over the best part of Thompson’s career, the part culminating with the demise of the arch-fiend, arch-political fiend, Richard Nixon. As with all journalists, as indeed with all writers especially those who are writing under the pressure of time-lines and for mass circulation media, these pieces show an uneven quality. Hunter's manic work habits, driven by high dope infusions and high-wire physical stress, only added to the frenzied corners of his work which inevitably was produced under some duress, a duress that drove his hard-boiled inner demons onward. However the total effect is to blast old bourgeois society almost to its foundations. Others, hopefully, will push on further.

One should note that "gonzo" journalism is quite compatible with socialist materialism. That is, the writer is not precluded from interpreting the events described within a story by interposing himself/herself as an actor in that story. The worst swindle in journalism, fostered by the formal journalism schools, as well as in the formal schools of other disciplines like history and political science, is that somehow one must be ‘objective’. Reality is better served if the writer puts his/her analysis correctly and then gets out of the way. In his best work that was Hunter’s way.

As a member of the generation of 1968 I would note that the period covered by this compilation was a period of particular importance in American history, the covering of which won Hunter his spurs as a journalist. Hunter, like many of us, cut his political teeth on wrestling with the phenomena of one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States, all-around political chameleon and off-hand common criminal. His articles beginning in 1968 when Nixon was on the rising curve of his never ending “comeback” trail to his fated (yes, fated) demise in the aftermath of the Watergate are required reading (and funny to boot). Thompson went out of his way, way out of his way, and with pleasure, skewering that man when he was riding high. He was moreover just as happy to kick Nixon when he was down, just for good measure. Nixon, as Robert Kennedy in one of his more lucid comments noted, represented the "dark side" of the American spirit- the side that appears today as the bully boy of the world and as craven brute. If for nothing else Brother Thompson deserves a place in the pantheon of journalistic heroes for this exercise in elementary political hygiene. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate THAT man before history please consult Thompson’s work.

Beyond the Nixon-related articles that form the core of the book there are some early pieces that are definitely not Gonzo-like. They are more straightforward journalism to earn a buck, although they show the trademark insightfulness that served Thompson well over the early part of his career. Read his pieces on Ernest Hemingway-searching in Idaho, the non-student left in the 1960’s, especially the earnest early 1960s before the other shoe dropped and we were all confronted with the madness of the beast, unchained , the impact of the ‘beats’ on the later counter cultural movements and about the ‘hippie’ invasion of San Francisco. The seminal piece on the Kentucky Derby in 1970 which is his ‘failed’ (according to him, not others) initial stab at “gonzo” journalism is a must read. And finally, if nothing else read the zany adventures of the articles that give us the title of the book, “The Great Shark Hunt”, and his ‘tribute’ to his friend the “Brown Buffalo” of future legend, Oscar Acosta. Those are high water marks in the great swirl of Hunter S. Thompson’s career. Hunter, I hope you find the Brown Buffalo wherever you are. Read this book. Read all his books.”

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love-From The Archives Of The “American Left History” Blog-Hunter Thompson-“Doctor Gonzo” Where Are You Now When We Need You?

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love-From The Archives Of The “American Left History” Blog-Hunter Thompson-“Doctor Gonzo” Where Are You Now When We Need You?

Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. In the times of this 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20^th of this year.   

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. He would have gone crazy seeing all the crew deserting the sinking U.S.S. Trump with guys like fired FBI Director Comey going to Capitol Hill and saying out the emperor has no clothes and would not know the truth if it grabbed him by the throat. Every day would be a feast day. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit    would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  

Markin comment:

One of the beautiful things about commentary on American bourgeois presidential electoral politics is that with a change of name here, maybe these days an added gender or two, maybe a longer list of contenders in one contest year than another, you can “cut and paste” from 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016 ( I’m ready) and be right on point. The following piece from the archives is a case in point. But the real beauty, as stated in the entry, is that I don’t have to actually vote for any of them. That, as the commercial says, is priceless.
********
In my old age I am getting a little weak-kneed about having to wade through the basically vacuous blather coming out of the Democratic and Republican presidential nominating processes. While we are in a little period of ‘doldrums’ before the deluge I keep falling back to the work of Hunter Thompson on earlier presidential campaigns to try to keep a little sanity. Here’s a little tribune to the fallen journalist. Damn, Hunter we sure as hell could use you now. Call me collect from wherever you are. I’ll gladly accept the charges. Selah.


This commentary was originally used as part of a review of Hunter Thompson's Songs of the Doomed. Since most of the points I made in my review of that book apply here I will let that review stand in for the essential thrust of his whole body of political work. Obviously each book written by Thompson on the various presidential campaigns is formatted differently but whether Thompson was skewering the Nixon era, the Reagan era, the Clinton era or the Bush eras the song is the same. And it was not (and is not) pretty.


Generally the most the trenchant social criticism, commentary and analysis complete with a prescriptive social program ripe for implementation has been done by thinkers and writers who work outside the realm of bourgeois society, notably socialists and other progressive thinkers. Bourgeois society rarely allows itself, in self defense, to be skewered by trenchant criticism from within. This was particularly true when it came from a known dope fiend, gun freak and all-around lifestyle addict like the late, lamented Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Although he was far from any thought of a socialist solution and would reject such a designation we could travel part of the way with him. We saw him as a kindred spirit. He was not one of us- but he was one of us. All honor to him for pushing the envelope of journalism in new directions and for his pinpricks at the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. Such men are dangerous.


I am not sure whether at the end of the day Hunter Thompson saw himself or wanted to been seen as a voice, or the voice, of his generation but he would not be an unworthy candidate. In any case, his was not the voice of the generation of 1968 being just enough older to have been formed by the earlier, less forgiving milieu of the 1950's. His earlier writings show his struggle to break out of formalistic journalism. Nevertheless, only a few, and with time it seems fewer in each generation, allow themselves to search for some kind of truth even if they cannot go the whole distance. This compilation under review is a hodgepodge of articles over the best part of Thompson's career. As with all journalists, as indeed with all writers especially those who are writing under the gun and for mass circulation media these works show an uneven quality. However the total effect is to blast old bourgeois society almost to its foundations. Others will have to push on further.


One should note that `gonzo' journalism is quite compatible with socialist materialism. That is, the writer is not precluded from interpreting the events described within himself/herself as an actor in the story. The worst swindle in journalism, fostered by the formal journalism schools, as well as in other disciplines like history and political science is that somehow one must be `objective'. Reality is better served if the writer puts his/her analysis correctly and then gets out of the way. In his best work that was Hunter's way.


As a member of the generation of 1968 I would note that this was a period of particular importance which won Hunter his spurs as a journalist. Hunter, like many of us, cut his political teeth on one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States and all- around political chameleon. Thompson went way out of his way, and with pleasure, skewering that man when he was riding high. He was moreover just as happy to kick him when he was down, just for good measure. Nixon represented the `dark side' of the American spirit- the side that appears today as the bully boy of the world and as craven brute. Sound familiar? If for nothing else Brother Thompson deserves a place in the pantheon of journalistic heroes for this exercise in elementary hygiene. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate THAT man before history please consult Thompson's work. Hunter, I hope you find the Brown Buffalo wherever you are. Read this book. Read all his books.

In The Time Of The Soviet-American World War II Friendship-With Edward Myrtryk’s Seven Miles From Alcatraz In Mind-Again

In The Time Of The Soviet-American World War II Friendship-With Edward Myrtryk’s Seven Miles From Alcatraz In Mind-Again  

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

Recently I responded to an old time film review, the Seven Miles From Alcatraz mentioned in the headline to this piece by my old friend and competitor Sandy Salmon (mentioned below in more detail) in order to express dismay not at the review which was perfectly okay but at what the plotline was trying to get at, what propaganda points since this was a World War II production were being made in the film itself. The plotline centered on a couple of escapees from the “Rock,” from Alcatraz out there in that big Japan seas swirl called San Francisco Bay where American land ended then (this during the height of World War II before bombed-out Hawaii acquired vaunted statehood to extend the empire). My objection to that plotline was that I found it incredulous that a filmmaker, a filmmaker who later would fall under the ax when the Cold War red scare freeze came rushing in (and later turn fink when they put the squeeze on), Edward Dmytryk, would bring a couple of hardened shoot ‘em up cons into the “popular front” against the Fascist Axis whatever his political sympathies were at the time.

I got two diverse reactions from that simple comment. One, from the unusual red-baiters who saw my comment as just another part of the international communist conspiracy to foul-up the pure American air, the purity of the cinema (using that exact high blown word which told me a lot about where they were coming from culturally) even some seventy years after the fact. I was befuddled by this tact since apparently these people had not heard the news, the rather old news, the Soviet empire had been dismantled about twenty-five years ago and was no longer in effect (although Russia is much in the news again these days but for different reasons).

The other respond was “shock” that I could not believe that two felons, two stalwart Americans in the immersed in the felony community, could identify with the just cause of the anti-Nazi struggle. In short that I wore my political incorrectness on my sleeve for all the candid world to see. Apparently in their view these guys who were ready to commit murder and mayhem against the denizens of the lighthouse that lammed onto in their escape until the Nazi menace confronted them in the face. The minute I saw those words felony community or maybe it was career criminal community I was seething at that point I knew I was in deep trouble.

For those who did not see the original comment (or Sandy’s rather ordinary but well-written review of the film which took the whole experience at face value I have re-posted it below with a few added points to address the “better dead than red” and better dead than politically incorrect comment. This should end the tempest in a teapot.    

*********

Okay, okay regular readers of this space (and of the on-line version of the American Film Gazette) know that I have, how did Pete Markin the administrator of this site put it, oh yeah, put myself out to pasture. In other words retired from the day to day grind of film reviews what with the inevitable deadlines sneaking up and giving me heartburn when I haven’t figured out a “hook” to tie the review up with and Pete is e-mailing me every other minute for copy like some whirling dervish (no offense to the dervish community intended) I had had enough. I had conned my old friend, colleague and competitor Sandy Salmon (from that same American Film Gazette where he was a regular film critic with a by-line long before I began to occasionally write for the publication) into doing the yeoman’s work until he in his turn will retire and let younger hands get their chance. (Maybe under the circumstances I such not have used the word “conned” which might offend members of the career criminal community so I will say “browbeat” which I assume will offend no “community.”) I also mentioned in that notice of retirement that I would occasionally comment on whatever I felt like commenting on as long as I didn’t have to meet some damn deadline.     

I have of late been impressed by some of Sandy’s reviews which are pretty good and which I have no quarrel with. What I have noticed when he reviews older films which is what this space is more and more dedicated to given the paucity of current first rate films is that some remark he makes or some insight of his gets me to the computer to make a comment. That is what I am up to today in regard to a recent review he did of a 1940s World War II film, part propaganda, part action thriller entitled Seven Miles From Alcatraz. The “hook” for me was not the fact that it was directed by Edward Myrtryk who would after the war be red-baited and scapegoated as one of the Hollywood Ten, guys who wouldn’t snitch on their fellows who might have in the past been reds, you know, communists . Honorably done at the time although unlike Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo he eventually spilled his guts to whoever would listen in order to save his wretched career. That direction might have been part of what I was looking at which I will explain in a minute since the thrust of the film fit in very well with what the American Communist Party on orders from Moscow were doing to help the war effort once the Soviets became allies of the Allied Alliance in 1941.        

No, what got me about this film was that even hardened criminals could under the story-line presented aid the war effort, could in this case be anti-Nazi fighters. My first reaction was WTF, yeah, that is exactly what I thought. Here is the gist of the story. A couple of hard cases tired of Alcatraz, the “Rock”, the supposedly inescapable Rock out in the dangerous Frisco Bay swirls and eddies escaped to a lighthouse out in the harbor, out by the Japan currents from what I could gather. At that lighthouse there was the lighthouse keeper (an important job in the treacherous waters in the Bay), his daughter and a couple of other guys, one a goof but the other who just so happens to turn out to be a Nazi spy. A Nazi spy who was connected with a group of fellow conspirators who have plans to blow up half of Frisco town once they grabbed a submarine ride off that lighthouse’s reaches and get back to the Fatherland. Naturally they get nowhere once these cons get their patriotic fervor up after they “realize” that if Frisco town goes the Rock goes too if they get captured and are returned there. The conspiracy and the sub once the military gets a fix on them from the lighthouse keeper after the cons struggle with the Nazi agents trying to get back home goes to the briny deep. Fair enough nobody liked the idea, least of all me, of half of Frisco town being blown up.

What is really galling though is the idea that these hardened hoods were to be considered cinematically part of the great united front to wipe the Nazis and their allies off the face of the earth. Guys from Steubenville, Ohio and Hazard, Kentucky who were itching to volunteer once the Japanese did their dastardly deeds at Pearl Harbor I understand as part of the front. Guys building ships, welding like crazy on three shifts 24/7/365 to produce a ship a day I get it. Rosy the riveter picking up the slack when the menfolk went off to war great. Granny planting her Victory Garden, nice work. Kids running around getting string and aluminum foil for the war effort good young citizens. But cons who would as soon as put a slug in you, hey, in that light-keeper if it came to it before they “got religion” on what was what with the damn Nazis no I cannot buy that. What was Dmytryk thinking of anyway when he took on this film and the screwy story line.                

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Russell Maroon Shoats

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Russell Maroon Shoats



http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html



A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

SHOATS, RUSSELL MAROON

Black Unity Council-Black Liberation Army