From Veterans For Peace- Thank an Anti-War Veteran

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

Thank an Anti-War Veteran

by PAUL STREET

FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail

Photo by miguelb | CC BY 2.0

Big Brother in the Aisles of HyVee

Repeat a lie often enough, the conventional Nazi propaganda wisdom ran, and it will become an accepted truth.

This last Veterans Day weekend, I couldn’t watch a sporting event, listen to a car radio, or even go shopping at the local grocery store without hearing a Great American Lie repeated over and over.

Sports announcers, radio talk-show hosts, commercials, and even a recorded voice blasted into the aisles of the HyVeee supermarket told me again and again that I owed my great American “freedom” to veterans and current enlistees of the U.S. military – in other words, to the Pentagon.

We are free to attend football and basketball games, I was told, because of our military veterans, thanks to the U.S. military.

We get to go shopping, the recorded voice at HyVee instructed me, because of “our” military. So “thank a veteran.”

Leaving my local grocery store last Sunday, I almost expected to see U.S. Marines guarding the perimeter of the parking lot so that terrorists couldn’t slaughter grateful citizens as we tried to purchased provisions. Was that an Army Rangers team in the frozen foods section?

Liberty and Justice for Some

And how much cherished freedom do U.S. Americans really enjoy in the U.S.-American “homeland,” home to the largest mass incarceration system in human history and to a giant, burgeoning, and lethal corporate police and surveillance state? Some Americans seem to have quite a bit more liberty than others, that’s for sure. Real freedom exists mainly for the nation’s upper One Percent, which owns well more than 90 percent of the nation’s wealth.  The holdings include much of the political class and a highly concentrated corporate and commercial media that generates images and narratives that “manufacture [mass] consent” to that savage inequality while selling an endless stream of consumer goods that help ruin livable ecology.

The selfish and reckless financial manipulations and transgressions of the wealthy Few carry few criminal penalties even when they clearly ruin the lives of millions of Americans, but poor inner-city drug dealers get sent to prison for years for selling piddling amounts of narcotics. Rich people who purchase, use, or sell illicit drugs hire fancy lawyers to stay out of jail and he felony record databases. Hence the penetrating title of Glenn Greenwald’s neat  2012 book: With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.

Another useful volume on this highly racialized class hypocrisy is Matt Taibbi’s The Divide: American Injustice in an Age of the Wealth Gap(2014). Taibbi exposed a “legal schizophrenia” that relentlessly punishes the poor but shows mercy for Wall Street. Reflecting on the Obama administration’s refusal to arrest top banksters, Taibbi found that the U.S. legal system exhibits a two-faced double standard – “letting major systemic offenders walk, bypassing the opportunity for important symbolic prosecutions [but]. . . putting the smallest of small fry on the rack for negligible offenses.” After detailing numerous cases of massive high-level financial fraud that escaped prosecution, Taibbi showed how ghetto residents are strip-searched for “blocking pedestrian traffic” and how public assistance applicants are forced to let drug-spooking investigators poke through their closets and cabinets. Poor U.S. women get jail time for lying about whether they live with a boyfriend or receiving welfare overpayments. The police arrest a man for carrying a joint but not a banker who supplies international drugs lords with billions of dollars.

The Public is Powerless

Meanwhile, the nation’s political system amounts to an open plutocracy wherein concentrated business power generally gets whatever it wants from government while the progressive, left-leaning and social-democratic working-class majority almost never gets any of the policies it desires. Majority opinion is technically irrelevant in a nation where the (ex-)citizenry has been turned into a “corporate-managed electorate” (Sheldon Wolin) whose supposedly meaningful input comes for two minutes in a voting booth in carefully stage-managed big money-major party-narrow-spectrum and candidate-centered electoral spectacles once every two or four years.

Corporate and financial cash, connections, personnel, and blackmail have gummed up the workings of the nation’s political, legal, educational, and criminal justice systems. This plutocratic sickness runs through U.S. politics and society like bad cholesterol. It chokes the arteries of the body politic, turning “our” ballyhooed “democracy” into an empty shell.

Don’t take it just from an openly Left radical. There’s a considerable mainstream political science and investigative journalist literature confirming that the U.S. is a de facto corporate and financial dictatorship in which the wishes of the populace are regularly cancelled and insulted by concentrated wealth. Summarizing the basic findings of this literature, distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Martin Gilens (Princeton) report in their new book Democracy in America? that:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest group – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout.  When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless…The will of majorities is often thwarted by the affluent and the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special favors for themselves…Majorities of Americans favor specific policies designed to deal with such problems as climate change, gun violence…inadequate public schools, and crumbling bridges and highways…[and favor] various programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs].”

Thanks to this “oligarchy,” as Page and Gilens unabashedly call it, the United States ranks at or near the bottom of the list of rich nationswhen it comes to numerous core indications of social health: economic disparity, intergenerational social mobility, racial inequality, racial segregation, infant mortality, poverty, child poverty, life expectancy, violence, incarceration, depression, mass literacy and numeracy, environmental sanity, and more. Economic globalization and labor-displacing technology are part of what plagues the U.S., Page and Gilens note, but “all other advanced countries have faced [those] same pressures” and “nearly all of them have done much better than we have at” limiting inequality.” Those countries have used “a range of egalitarian public policies to spread the gains from trade and technology more widely, allowing many more of their citizens to benefit.”

Thanks to the ideological power of the American oligarchy, moreover, U.S. business elites have advanced the false notion that workers and the poor are personally to blame for their dire straits more successfully than have capitalists and their servants in any other nation.

Workplace Despotism

Page and Gilens are highly privileged and tenured academics who enjoy remarkable and autonomous control of their own work lives.  That and the fact that they aren’t Marxists, or some other kind of anti-capitalist radicals means that they have nothing to say about a very underestimated way in which the United States is not a democracy. As the radical economist Richard Wolff likes to remind us, ordinary working-class and working-age Americans spend most of their waking lives on the job, under the authoritarian and often despotic supervision of employers, to whom workers must rent out their labor power to obtain the means of exchange with which to purchase basic life necessities. When it ceases to be profitable or otherwise “cost-effective” to retain workers, employers throw them out onto the wage-suppressing “reserve army of labor,” turning millions of once productive engaged citizens into “surplus Americans.” Until its workers themselves own, direct, and structure their own workplaces (and labor processes) as “associated producers,” democratically determining the purpose and nature of their productive activities and appropriating the surplus generated for themselves and the broader common good, it is difficult to think of a society as meaningfully democratic.

The Right-Handed State

Thanks to the relative scarcity and weakness of “egalitarian public policies” in the U.S. compared to other rich nations, American “social control” (class rule) relies on police-state repression to a relatively greater degree. The weaker the velvet-gloved “left hand of the state” (as Pierre Bourdieu called the social-democratic and inclusive parts of modern government) in maintaining social order, the stronger the iron- fisted “right hand of the state.”

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) permits the U.S. military to arrest anyone, including U.S. citizens, and detain them indefinitely without due process (and even to send them to torture chambers in any foreign country) on suspicion of offering “substantial support” to those organizations determined “terrorist” by the Pentagon.  The federal executive branch is free to draw up and act on kill lists that include U.S. citizens.

The NDAA also codifies into law the participation of the military in domestic policing, violating a libertarian U.S. principle that goes back to the nineteenth century.  The principle holds little meaning in a time when U.S. police departments have become militarized (and para-militarized) and high-tech private “security” companies loaded with military veterans proliferate across the “homeland” as well the imperial hinterland.

Oligarchy is not freedom.  A corporate police state is not popular self-rule.

Empire’s Service to “Homeland” Inequality

Corporate War/Welfare

What is the role of the military in all this? Where to begin? Beyond what I’ve already suggested, the Pentagon System’s giant budget of so-called defense contracts is a potent mechanism for upward wealth distribution to the politically powerful owners and top managers of high-tech military firms like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing.  The military budget is a colossal form of corporate welfare that helps make the plutocratically entrenched Few yet more opulent and powerful.

Open Door

The U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines have long worked to expand and protect the global capitalist “open door” system of untrammeled investor rights. By opening-up and protecting U.S.-based multinational corporations’ access to foreign markets, labor supplies, and raw materials, the Pentagon helps capital bid down the price of labor power and win weakened government regulations, unions, and lower taxes in the U.S. “homeland.”

Imperial Repression Migrates Home

The military’s endless foreign wars and interventions are a continual source of tools and techniques for repression of the restless Many at home.  From the development of “nonlethal crowd control” technologies (lethal for the right of public assembly) like the Long Range Acoustic Device (sound cannon) to the formation of urban counter-insurgency strategies and latest means and methods of surveillance, tracking, and interrogation, the military’s foreign missions are a great boon from the project of suppressing “homeland” dissent.

“The fetters imposed on liberty at home,” James Madison noted in 1799, “have ever been forged out of weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers abroad.”

Just over one century later, another great American thinker, Mark Twain, pondered the United States’ brutal pacification of the Philippines. Writing an imagined history of 20^th century America, Twain reflected on how the United States’ “lust for conquest” had “destroyed the Great Republic” since “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other peoples’ liberties, lived to suffer for their own mistake.”

“Indeed,” the distinguished American historian Alfred W. McCoy notes, “just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words, colonial police methods migrated homeward from the Philippines to provide models for the creation of an all-American internal security apparatus.” That process has continued to the present day.

Have you ever been surveilled, my fellow American, by a drone?  I have, right in the “democratic” U.S., heartland, protesting the construction of the eco-cidal Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in southeastern Iowa last year.

Ask the DAPL-fighters and water- and climate-protectors from Standing Rock about the homeward migration of imperial police tools and methods (Of course, Native American activists might remind you that the means and culture of overseas imperial conquest and repression were first developed in the U.S. military’s original genocidal ethnic-cleansing of indigenous North Americans).

The Great Demonic Suction Tube

At the same time, the military budget eats up vast resources needed to build a welfare state that could help ordinary U.S. citizens participate meaningfully in “their” purported exemplary democracy. “We the people” cannot pay for the good social-democratic things that most U.S.-Americans want – things like single-payer health insurance, free college, giant public works and green jobs programs, and a broadly expanded social safety net – while they (well, their plutocratically selected “representatives”) continue to dedicate 54 percent of federal discretionary spending to paying for a colossal, historically unmatched global military empire that carries the world’s single largest institutional carbon footprint while accounting for 40 percent of the world’s  military spending, maintaining at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign countries, and  keeping (in David Vine’s words) “troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories.”

It’s an old problem. As Martin Luther King, Jr. explained in his famous Riverside Church speech on April 4, 1967, America will “never invest the necessary funds or energies” to end poverty and domestic economic insecurity so long as its military machine “continue[s] to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”

Someone should tell Bernie Sanders. Again and again, the “independent” (progressive Democrat) Senator from Vermont cites the Scandinavian nations of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as his social policy role models without mentioning that these countries spend comparably miniscule portions of their national budgets on the military.

The War Budget as Class Rule

The war budget’s trumping of the social democracy budget is, among other things, a democracy issue in the “homeland.”  Imagine the freedom and democracy dividend that would flow from the United States finally honoring majority public opinion by making health care a human right with the passage of Medicare for All. Millions of U.S. workers are afraid to say, write, or do anything their bosses might disapprove of on or off the job. The dependence of employees on their bosses for their health insurance has all-too rarely noted authoritarian implications. The self-described homeland and headquarters of global freedom is a country in which you put not just your job but also your health care coverage and often your family’s health coverage at risk merely by saying, writing or doing anything your workplace superiors find objectionable.

The kinds of basic activities that can jeopardize you and your loved ones’ medical coverage are endless. They include trying to form a union, participating in a work stoppage, putting up a Facebook post against racism, backing a political candidate your employer dislikes, attending an environmentalist protest or even just dressing in a way that irritates a boss or letting it be known that you have a better way to perform some work task. First Amendment rights of free speech and public assembly don’t mean much when exercising them can cost you your job, or your health care and that of your family.

It isn’t just about health care, of course. There’s an intimate relationship between the strength of a nation’s left-handed social welfare state and its ordinary citizens’ capacity and willingness to fight for their own interests and/or the common good. It’s not for nothing that you can’t receive food stamps while engaged in a labor strike in the U.S. The American business class used its influence to prohibit state food assistance to striking workers long ago. Capitalists know that working people’s marketplace, workplace, and political bargaining power are enhanced by the existence of a strong government safety net, which reduces the hazard workers face when they challenge capitalist authority. Big business has pushed through the dismantlement and delegitimization of social welfare programs for decades, in no small part because capitalists-as-employers want, in political science professor Frances Fox Piven’s words, “to make long hours of low-wage work the only available option for many.”

The roll-back and pre-emption the welfare state net carries a double windfall for the U.S. capitalist class: (1) slashing social expenditures and programs saves the rich tax payments to support and uplift the poor and common good; (2) the-working-class majority has less power to resist and challenge the wealthy Few’s power when there’s no strong, left-handed welfare state backing it up.

Along with the plutocratic policy-ordained collapse of U.S. unions and collective bargaining, the comparative weakness of the U.S. welfare state is a key factor behind the long stagnation of wages and the nation’s extreme levels  of economic, social, and political inequality. The giant military budget and “suction tube” is a key part of that weakness.

To make matters worse, the military state and its many political and intellectual champions justify the Pentagon’s exorbitant taxpayer bill by appealing to nationalistic values paraded in such a way as to blunt popular consciousness and anger regarding class and other “homeland” disparities. Proper nationalist homage to “our” troops and veterans –  to the giant U.S. military empire– requires us to put aside our supposedly minor and selfish grievances against domestic class rule, racism, the police and prison state, and corporate pollution, etc. We must drop such trifling concerns to demonstrate proper allegiance to “one nation, under God, indivisible, with,” supposedly, “liberty and justice for all.” So what if real liberty and so-called justice are reserved primarily for those with a lot of wealth – for Greenwald’s “some”?

“The Military Keynesian Alternative”

It’s no accident that the U.S. business “elite” preferred guns over butter when it came to sustaining and sparking the U.S. economy with government outlays after the Great Depression and World War II. It was understood across the U.S. establishment that large-scale government spending was required to keep U.S. and global capitalism afloat after the war.  The only question was what kind of spending would best provide this state-capitalist function: guns (militarism) or (social welfare) butter?  The answer was the former.  Massive spending on empire, war, and the preparation for war provided a useful way for the U.S. government to stimulate demand and sustain the corporate political economy without threatening business-class power and wealth.  As the leading capitalist magazine Business Weekcandidly reflected in early 1949:

“There’s a tremendous social and economic difference between welfare pump-priming and military pump-priming…Military spending doesn’t really alter the structure of the economy.  It goes through the regular [corporate state] channels.  As far as a businessman is concerned, a munitions order from the government is much like an order from a private customer.  But the kind of welfare and public works spending that [liberals and leftists favor] …does alter the economy.  It makes new channels of its own.  It creates new institutions.  It redistributes wealth…It changes the whole economic pattern” (emphasis added)

As Noam Chomsky explained four and a half decades later:

“Business leaders recognized that social spending could stimulate the economy, but much preferred the military Keynesian alternative —for reasons having to do with privilege and power...The Pentagon system’s form of industrial policy does not have the undesirable side-effects of social spending directed at human needs. Apart from unwelcome redistributive effects, the latter policies tend to interfere with managerial prerogatives; useful production may undercut private gain, while state-subsidized waste production (arms, Man-on-the-Moon extravaganzas, etc.) is a gift to the owners and managers, to whom any marketable spin-offs will be promptly delivered. Social spending may also arouse public interest and participation, thus enhancing the threat of democracy; the public cares about hospitals, roads, neighborhoods, but has no opinions about the choice of missile and high-tech fighter planes. The defects of social spending do not taint the military-Keynesian alternative.” (Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, 1994, 100-101).

We should also factor in the Fox-Piven point: social-welfare safety net programs and spending give the working-class majority more freedom, more back-up, to resist ruling business class power and demands within and beyond the workplace.

It’s the Opposite

Meanwhile, I’d like some sports announcer or HyVee’s public relations director to explain to me exactly how  the U.S. military’s savage crucifixion of Southeast Asia (with an Asian death toll as high as 5 million) during the 1960s and 1970s (in a one-sided war of U.S. invasion to prevent a poor peasant nation from following its own independent path of socially just development), how the U.S. military’s destruction of Iraq (1991 to present) and Libya (2011), and how the killing of thousands of civilians by U.S. drones in the Muslim world have increased ordinary Americans’ freedom at home?

If anything, it’s the opposite.  The American Empire’s terrifying and oppressive, widely loathed presence and position around the world puts U.S. citizens at risk of terrorist “blowback” at home and abroad.  The U.S. is the overwhelming choice (for damn good reasons) of world citizens polled by Gallup on the question of which country represents the biggest threat to peace on the planet . How would U.S. citizens like to live in constant fear of a foreign power’s killer drones and jets overhead and/or its special forces paramilitaries in a nearby town and/or its nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers just offshore? “Our” military’s nasty habits of invading and occupying other “sovereign” nations, supporting vicious regimes (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Columbia, Ukraine, etc.), dictators and absolutists, and blowing up women, children, and villages around the planet makes U.S.-Americans less, not more, safe and secure. People don’t take kindly to that kind of treatment.

Less safe, it is important to add, from Big Brother at home. The wars and “blowback” – terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens and military personnel at home and abroad – that our frankly terrorist Empire (Google up my name and “Bola Boluk,” “Highway of Death,” and “Fallujah” to read accounts of mass-murderous U.S. terrorism) provoke create endless pretexts and opportunities for U.S. authorities to attack civil liberties and foster an authoritarian culture of “national unity” that silences dissent at home.

I often thank veterans – the numerous ones I’ve met who have turned against the Empire they once served and who have since chosen instead to serve the people in their struggle against the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, race, and empire at home and abroad.

Please help Paul Street keep writing here.

Join the debate on Facebook

More articles by:PAUL STREET

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

Of The Caffe Lena And Stuff-Rosalie Sorrels’ My Last Go Round

Of The Caffe Lena And Stuff-Rosalie Sorrels’ My Last Go Round

CD Review

By Zack James

My Last Go Round, Rosalie Sorrels and friends, 2002 

My old high school friend, Seth Garth, who went every step of the way with me back in the 1960s into the Cambridge folk and coffeehouse scene since we lived in next town Arlington reminded me recently that we had spread our folk wings further than Cambridge and its rather boisterous scene. We had taken a few trips down to Mecca, to Greenwich Village in New York City and imbibed the full effect there. But the folk minute while it didn’t survive the British invasion and the rise of “acid” rock to grab young ears also had little outposts in places that one would not assume such music would have much play, at least back then. Seth and I had made a trip to Saratoga in those days to see a cousin of his who was going to Skidmore College. One Saturday night he took us to the Caffe Lena in that town, a small, a very small coffeehouse (still there unlike many other more famous venues which went under when the folk tide ebbed), run by a wild old woman, Lena, who single-handedly ran the place, kept the folk minute alive in that region, kept many a budding folkie from Arlo Guthrie to the McGarrigle Sisters from the wolves and from street corners. It was there that we first saw that night Rosalie Sorrels singing up songs of protest and blues, singing some stuff by a guy named Bruce Phillips, later to be called more famously Utah Phillips.    

All of this a roundabout way of introducing the CD under review, My Last Go Round, a live album of her last public performance along with some of her friends at the Saunders Theater at Harvard in 2002 which Seth and I both attended with our wives who in their own ways had imbibed the folk minute in other locales (Ann Arbor and Berkeley). Rosalie had decided to give up the road, to stick closer to home, so had invited his friends from Caffe Lena and other roads to come and perform. Invited those who were still standing and who could make it. Unfortunately the legendary Dave Van Ronk one of the key figures in the budding folk movement in New York in the late 1950s who was supposed to perform had passed away a few weeks before (to be replaced by the still standing now David Bromberg) which placed a damper on the proceedings.            

It was at this performance that Seth and I (along with the our wives) first took stock than those who stood tall in that 1960s folk minute were starting to pass on and that we had better see performances of whoever was left standing as best we could. We additionally, as we sat in the Café Algiers on Brattle Street after the performance for a late night coffee and pastry (some things never change for that was the bill of fare in the old days when we, low on funds, gravitated to the coffeehouses for cheap dates in high school and college), got into an animated conversation about who did, and who did not, still have “it.” Have a spark of that old time ability to draw a crowd to them. David Bromberg did (and does after a fairly recent performance seen at a Boston venue where he blew the crowd away with his music and a very fine back-up band. And yes, very much yes, Rosalie Sorrels, now sadly passed as well, still had it that night at the Saunders Theater. Listen up.        

Title IX Witchhunts, Anti-Sex Frenzy and Bourgeois Feminism (Women and Revolution pages)

Workers Vanguard No. 1121	3 November 2017

Title IX Witchhunts, Anti-Sex Frenzy and Bourgeois Feminism

(Women and Revolution pages)

---

Unwanted Advances

Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus

A Review

---

Is the specter of sex haunting the campus? Under the pretense of targeting sexual harassment and assault, university administrations have been whipping up a climate of fear and imposing neo-Victorian values. As the recent book Unwanted Advances—Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (HarperCollins Publishers, April 2017) argues, “The new campus codes aren’t preventing nonconsensual sex; they’re producing it.” Written by Northwestern University professor and self-described left-wing feminist Laura Kipnis, the book exposes the vastly expanded definitions of sexual assault, which criminalize anything from drunken hook-ups to student-professor romance and even allow for consent to be withdrawn retroactively.

Kipnis joins others who have blown the whistle on the Title IX “sexual misconduct” investigation apparatus. Title IX was originally enacted in 1972 to outlaw sex discrimination in federally financed institutions, to increase funding for women’s college sports and women’s enrollment in medical and law schools. Now it has been turned into a mammoth kangaroo court without any semblance of due process for the accused. In 2011, Obama’s administration issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” containing revised Title IX guidelines with which colleges had to comply or risk losing federal funding. Most striking of these guidelines was the adoption of the lowest standard of proof, a “preponderance of evidence,” in campus sexual assault hearings. By this standard, the accused can be convicted based on anything over a 50 percent likelihood of guilt, as opposed to “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal cases. Students have had their scholarships withdrawn and been expelled, and professors have had their careers destroyed based on mere speculation.

With sexual harassment vaguely defined as “unwelcome conduct,” university bureaucrats have gone after teachers and students alike for controversial comments and misguided jokes or compliments. And though one would be hard pressed to find sex on campus that doesn’t involve some level of intoxication, under the Obama-era guidelines, any sexual act under the influence is treated as nonconsensual.

Kipnis herself witnessed firsthand a process that is normally cloaked in a veil of secrecy after she became a target of a Title IX investigation for having written an essay. Students complained that she had created a hostile environment with her Chronicle of Higher Education piece, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” (February 2015), which opposed prohibitions on student-faculty relationships and other draconian campus sex codes. After documenting this sinister circus in a follow-up essay, “My Title IX Inquisition” (May 2015), Kipnis became an unintentional spokesperson for countless victims of the anti-sex bureaucracy.

To be sure, rape and sexual harassment happen, and universities are well versed in sweeping cases of criminal sexual violence under the rug to preserve their reputations. Kipnis goes out of her way to prove she’s not “soft” on rape. But it is no help to victims of real abuse for voluntary and involuntary acts to be lumped together under the umbrella-like designation of “sexual misconduct,” i.e., to make no distinction between discomfort and coercion. As we wrote following the implementation of “yes means yes” legislation in California: “The suggestion that a misunderstanding—or for that matter, bad or unpleasant sex—is equivalent to rape is not only ludicrous but dangerously trivializing of actual sexual violence” (“Sex and Consent on Campus,” WV No. 1056, 14 November 2014).

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced in September that she would rescind Obama’s guidelines, feminists and Democratic Party politicos were quick to decry the move as yet another attack by an overtly racist and ultra-conservative administration. Trump and his right-wing cohorts have a sinister program to eliminate women’s right to abortion and to wage a racist war on what little remains of affirmative action. But the Democrats represent the interests of the same bourgeois ruling class as the Republicans, and also push an anti-woman agenda, including sexual repression. In fact, expanding the powers of the government and its agents in the university administration, cynically done in the name of defending the vulnerable, is a gift to the reactionary forces that aim to dismantle Title IX and go after civil rights wholesale.

The Uses and Abuses of Title IX

The current anti-sex campaign is rooted in the bipartisan rollback of the limited but real gains won through struggles in the late 1960s and early ’70s amid the radicalization during the fight for black rights and against the Vietnam War. But important concessions, such as the legal right to abortion, have since been undermined or overturned by the ruling class—see the massive erosion of Roe v. Wade. Reforms are always reversible when power remains in the hands of the capitalist exploiters.

In the 1980s, a right-wing “family values” offensive was joined by a liberal/feminist auxiliary that went on to promote panic over “date rape” on campuses. The Title IX apparatus has become the latest tool in the rulers’ decades-long anti-sex crusade to justify augmenting the police forces of the state and legitimize intrusion into private life—from the demented accusations of satanic ritual abuse against day-care workers in the 1980s to the permanent ostracizing of hundreds of thousands of people branded “sex offenders” today. Stirring up mass anxiety conveniently diverts discontent away from the horrors of life for the bulk of society: unemployment, plunging wages and soaring costs of housing, health care and education.

Aside from Kipnis’s own story, which she relates with impressive wit, the central case of Unwanted Advances is that of Peter Ludlow, a highly regarded, tenured professor of philosophy at Northwestern. Ludlow was driven out of the university by the Title IX authorities who found him guilty of sexual harassment in two cases. One involved an undergraduate who accused him of forcing her to drink alcohol and groping her; in the other, a graduate student claimed there had been a nonconsensual act during their months-long relationship. Ludlow denied all accusations. During drawn-out Star Chamber procedures, he was banned from campus and smeared in the press as a rapist. Blacklisted, Ludlow resigned and moved to Mexico, dead broke from legal fees. He handed over all his documentation to Kipnis, which confirmed her suspicion that the case was a frame-up.

In page after page of engrossing detail, Kipnis describes the sexual misconduct inquisition: the accused has no right to know the charges, nor who made them, which makes mounting an effective defense nearly impossible; hearings are conducted in secret and typically conclude with a gag order on the accused; the investigators act as judge and jury, and can raise accusations based on hearsay. Kipnis exposes the rampant bias of the Title IX officers in favor of women they call “survivors,” a term that presupposes the charges to be true (and the man to be the aggressor).

In reviewing Ludlow’s case, Kipnis discovered a backstage adviser in the affair who has played a nefarious role in many other Title IX investigations, Professor Heidi Lockwood. Defying all logic, Lockwood denies that consent is the decisive factor in determining whether sex is consensual. In her schema, widely shared in feminist academia, consent does not exist if there are “differentials in power.” The logic of Lockwood’s construct is that women are never independent beings during heterosexual sex since we live in a patriarchy.

Sex—which under bourgeois morality is colored by shame, fear and religious dogma, not to mention class and racial inequality—is often messy and complicated. But we do not believe that someone who is simply older, has a better job or is in a position of authority inevitably turns his or her “subordinate” into a passive automaton. As long as those participating consent at the time, nobody else, least of all the state or campus administrators, has the right to tell them if or how they can do it. For Marxists, the guiding principle in sexual relations is effective consent: what two (or more) people agree to do, regardless of age, gender or sexual preference, is no business of the government or campus authorities.

In her recent book and essays, Kipnis challenges how female students are infantilized as helpless victims of professors with whom they’ve had sexual relations. She harks back to her own years as a college student, before sex was considered dangerous and when screwing professors “was more or less part of the curriculum.” The number of students and teachers who have fallen for each other and acted on it over the years is legion. To condemn these acts is a blatant attempt to control and criminalize sex (or anything hinting of it) between consenting individuals. We oppose all “age of consent” laws that prohibit consensual sexual relations in the name of “protecting” youth; we do not accord the capitalist state the right to decree an arbitrary age at which people can experiment, desire or fool around. Likewise, we oppose all laws against “crimes without victims” such as prostitution, gambling, drug use or pornography.

Anti-sex hysteria intersects the racial oppression that is central to U.S. capitalism. In a country where simply being a black man is enough for the cops to frame you up for something, blacks and minorities are particularly targeted as supposed predators. Panic over black male sexuality and interracial sex has long been used as a justification for (legal or extralegal) lynch rope terror—look at the Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till. Unwanted Advances mentions in passing the story of a black college athlete charged with sexual assault for giving his girlfriend a hickey. The case was that of Colorado State University student Grant Neal. Although the woman emphatically reported that no nonconsensual act had taken place, a “friend” of hers reported the hickey to the Title IX authorities. Grant was suspended, his athletic scholarship was revoked, and no other college would admit him. He later sued the university for discrimination, settling out of court.

As reported by journalist Emily Yoffe in an article, “The Question of Race in Campus Sexual-Assault Cases” (Atlantic, 11 September), Colgate University was recently investigated for race discrimination in its sexual assault adjudication process. On a campus where only 4 percent of students are black, during the 2013-14 academic year black male students made up half of those accused of sexual violations. Black and immigrant students, who more often than not lack the financial resources to mount an effective legal defense, are exceptionally vulnerable in the face of bigoted and zealous prosecutors. Title IX has also been used to railroad gay people and leftists.

The Myth of “Rape Culture”: Sex Panic as Social Control

The ideological backdrop to sexual paranoia on campus is the notion of “rape culture.” Kipnis challenges two ubiquitous claims: that one in five college women is a victim of sexual assault, and that only 2 percent of rape allegations are false. In fact, contrary to the image of universities as a hotbed for rapists and predators, students actually experience lower rates of sexual violence than their non-college counterparts. As far back as the 1990s, Princeton grad student Katie Roiphe challenged the notion of a so-called “epidemic” of date rape on campuses in her defiant book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (see “The ‘Date Rape’ Issue: Feminist Hysteria, Anti-Sex Witchhunt,” Women and Revolution No. 43, Winter 1993-Spring 1994).

The false “one in five” figure originates from Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, which infamously contended that rape or threat of rape is the main way in which all men control allwomen. Pervaded with racist and anti-sex filth, the book equivocated on the defense of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth who was kidnapped and lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Brownmiller presented the whistle by Till—whose killing was a galvanizing incident for the civil rights movement—as a “deliberate insult just short of physical assault.”

Kipnis shrewdly argues that “rape culture” has become the university counterpart of the September 11 attacks that have been used as the justification for the wholesale shredding of civil liberties under the guise of the “war on terror”:

“On campus, the term rape culture, like the term terrorism, has become the rhetoric of emergency. Fear becomes the guidelines, promulgating more fear…. The failed war exacerbates the fears, which becomes the rationale for further expanding the security state: vast expenditures, increased layers of bureaucracy, surveillance, secret renditions, summary justice—like expelling a freshman for ‘emotional coercion’.”

Unwanted Advances touches on the social and economic backdrop to the regulation of sex. Today, where even a miserable $15 an hour is out of reach for millions of workers, college-age adults see a precarious future. Decent-paying employment is far from guaranteed even with a four-year degree, which in any case leaves graduates saddled with debt, chained to their parents’ housing and health insurance. Combine that with concern that a romantic encounter could end up with one being marked a “sex criminal,” and you have a solid means for the ruling class to push social conformity.

Part of why Kipnis was able to maintain her composure during her own farcical Title IX trial was because, as a tenured professor, she felt her job was secure. Today, the bulk of professors are not so lucky. Over half of all university instructors are part-time adjuncts—low-paid contract employees with no union representation or job security. If an adjunct instructor is brought up on even the flimsiest charges of sexual misconduct, their career is immediately on the line.

Title IX “sex offender” vendettas strengthen the power of the reactionary campus administrations to strip tenured faculty and staff of the few protections they have. Students, professors and campus workers should have more defense against misconduct allegations, not less. The fight to gain and extend protections on campus, including union rights, requires a fight against the administration, which runs the university on behalf of the anti-woman, anti-black, anti-worker ruling class.

Bourgeois Feminism vs. Revolutionary Marxism

In capitalist society, the prospects of justice for actual victims of rape are bleak. Women who report rape are routinely harassed by the police and practically put on trial themselves while the courts inspect their “morality.” In the bourgeois legal system, the prosecution of sexual offenses has little to do with protecting women against violence and more to do with maintaining their subjugation within the family. The institution of the family is the main source of the oppression of women and children. For the bourgeoisie, the family is used to pass property on to the next generation. For working people, the family—in which women are consigned to running the household and rearing the next generation—inculcates and reinforces bourgeois ideology and morals and, above all, obedience to authority.

Anti-sex witchhunts not only bolster the family, but also provide an ideological basis for state repression. For Marxists, the capitalist state—including the cops, courts and prisons—is the instrument for the suppression of the exploited and oppressed by the exploiters. Alongside the family and organized religion, it plays a key role in enforcing the oppression of women and youth. Feminists, even radical or “socialist” ones, operate entirely within the framework of capitalist rule and reject this understanding. In fact, one form of feminism today is called “carceral feminism” because it pushes for more policing, prosecution and imprisonment as the solution to violence against women.

Kipnis denounces carceral feminism and paternalist feminism, i.e., the concept that women should be protected and men policed, and argues in favor of “grown-up feminism.” For her, the feminism from her generation has been “hijacked.” She notes that college students in the 1960s and ’70s fought to end the in loco parentis prerogatives of campus administrations, while her students today invite college administration snoops into their bedrooms.

Yet feminists have often lined up with some of the most virulent reactionaries, including allying with religious fundamentalists, to support the bourgeoisie’s anti-sex witchhunts—from censoring porn to criminalizing “deviant” sex. Feminism is based on the false consciousness of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women who seek to enter the straight male club of power and privilege. Their strategy has been to rely on the capitalist Democratic Party to defend women, which serves only to demobilize fighters for women’s rights.

While Kipnis bemoans the fact that abortion rights, equal pay, childcare and maternity leave have been relegated to mere side issues, she still relies on feminism to address such concerns. In fact, the fight for things like free, quality 24-hour childcare, equal pay for equal work, and free contraception and abortion must be tied to a struggle to overthrow the economic system that is the source of women’s oppression. The liberation of women requires a socialist revolution, which will uproot the private property system and replace the family with socialized childcare and housework, bringing women fully into social and political life.

Fake Socialists Join Anti-Sex Frenzy

It is a mark of the reactionary political climate that Unwanted Advances has either been ignored or treated with contempt by the bulk of the left. Kipnis has instead been lauded by right-wing libertarian groups like FIRE and Reason, both with ties to the Koch brothers. These groups have been promoting the faux “free speech” agenda on campus as a cover for racist, sexist provocations. Kipnis is perplexed by such praise from those who want to destroy the left. By entrusting the capitalist state with powers that will inevitably be used against them, liberals and feminists have handed a weapon to the right wing. It is a measure of how much reformist socialists have adapted to puritanical “family values” that they march in lockstep with the feminists (read: Democrats) to promote bourgeois behavior codes.

In the article “DeVos Is Turning the Clock Back on Survivors” (Socialist Worker, 13 September), the International Socialist Organization (ISO) laments DeVos’s latest action as one of a “series of attacks against survivors by the current administration,” and declares: “We will not go back.” The ISO hails Obama’s “Dear Colleague Letter” and retails dubious statistics about sexual assault in order to join what they hail as a “growing” movement against sexual violence on campus. That movement plugs the inherently racist, sexist and elitist bourgeois education system as a “space” in which women, transgender people or racial minorities can be “safe” from oppression.

Socialist Alternative (SAlt) has latched onto the same movement, in particular at UCLA, where they have been active around the Title IX case of Gabriel Piterberg. An Israeli, pro-Palestinian professor of history, Piterberg was charged with sexual harassment by two grad students in 2014. While denying the charges, he made a settlement with the university, which included being fined, suspended for a quarter without pay, and removed from his position as director of the university’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. But this was not enough for SAlt and its cohorts in the feminist Bruins Against Sexual Harassment. Student protesters repeatedly shut down his classes, railing that UCLA was protecting a “sexual predator.”

Whatever happened between Piterberg and his accusers, we oppose eternal punishment, akin to being branded a sex offender for life. Piterberg is also a well-known defender of the oppressed Palestinian people who has been targeted for years by powerful Zionist forces. His treatment raises the question of whether the Title IX apparatus is being used to do the Zionists’ dirty work.

While no one can fix all the problems of sexual relations in this rotten, decaying society, we oppose all attempts to fit human sexuality into pre-ordained “norms.” To create genuinely equal relations between people in all spheres, including sex, requires nothing less than the destruction of the capitalist system through a series of socialist revolutions internationally, opening the way to the creation of a communist world. In a classless society, social and economic constraints on sexual relations will be nonexistent, and in the words of Friedrich Engels, “There is no other motive left except mutual inclination.”

The Boy With Two Left Feet-With Fred Astaire And Ginger Roger’s 1935 Film Roberta In Mind

The Boy With Two Left Feet-With Fred Astaire And Ginger Roger’s 1935 Film Roberta In Mind

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

Remember the expression made famous, or infamous depending on your perspective, about old soldiers never dying but just fading away. Well it appears that yours truly, Sam Lowell, now supposedly placed “out to pasture” is still taking every opportunity to sneak a comment or quasi-film review as he fades into the sunset. Today’s comment concerns a film review that new film critic Sandy Salmon did a few days ago on the 1935 film Roberta starring the prolific dance team of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire with Paris and high fashion as the backdrop. Whatever the backdrop, whatever, as Sandy pointed out, the scriptwriter put down for plot the whole exercise was strictly as a vehicle for Rogers and Astaire bursting into song and/or dancing to the high heavens. Take that for what it is worth but what interests me is a comment Sandy made about his own youthful, well, two left feet, which made his social life, meaning his high school date life rather tenuous. Today I join the club, the club of two left feet dreamers dreaming that they were sweeping some damsel off her feet, or at least keeping off her feet, Fred Astaires.        

Naturally a story goes with it. See in high school I was sweet, okay, okay I had a “crush” on this girl from my sophomore English class, Theresa Wallace, based on the great conversations we had about literature mostly I think then on the work of Thomas Hardy and various other English authors that I, and she, were crazy for. I think she liked me too although I was a little shy and backward about picking up any feminine hints and furthermore had heard nothing on the high speed grapevine which would convey that information with such candor that it would be the envy of any professional intelligence organization like the CIA or NSA today . The big thing that I was interested in was whether she was taken, “going steady” in the terms of the day. That question got answered in the negative fortunately for in our neighborhood, among the corner boys in the know, if a girl was taken then that signaled “hands-off” as a question of honor although I later, too late, found out that tradition was honored more in the breech than the observance. The big thing here was that Theresa was “single.”         

We were having a conversation during lunch break one day, don’t ask me what the gist of the conversation was, when out of the blue Theresa mentioned that he parents were really strict, were hard-shell 12^th Street Baptists which I guess then was pretty serious stuff although I had my own problems with my Roman Catholic religion so I wasn’t in a position to evaluate the seriousness of her family’s religious bent. What she then said which gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach was that they would not allow her to go out on dates, not with boys, not on double dates, nothing except church sponsored socials heavily chaperoned. The next thing she said though sent me to heaven or something like that, happy anyway. She, after something like a civil war with her parents when she described the situation to me, had persuaded them to let her go to the Spring Frolic, the big sophomore class dance. She had to go alone or with her girlfriends but no boys were coming to the door and no boys were to take her home. I guess from the restrictions it was a close thing whether they would let her dance with boys at the dance.

The important thing was that she was wondering whether I was going or not. Now usually I avoided school dances (church ones too) like the plague after what happened in seventh grade at the Christmas dance which I will describe a little shortly. My idea for Theresa before she told me about her parents strictures was maybe ask her to the movies or to go to Doc’s Drugstore to listen to the jukebox but not to a dance, no way. But Theresa gave me such a smile while she was asking if I was going or not it put me in a quandary. Then she said although I couldn’t pick her up she would meet me at the dance and we could have a few dances together if I liked. If I liked. You know I was going to the dance after that invitation come hell or high water.                

      

That brings up the why of my serious avoidance of dances. Back in seventh grade I was something of a good guy for girls to talk too without being fresh, showing some respect. For that I caught the eye of Betsy Binstock, the prettiest girl in seventh grade, who came up to me one day around Thanksgiving and asked me if I would take her to the Christmas dance. You know what I said so we don’t even have to go into that. I was thrilled but I also knew that I knew nothing about dancing except some silly stuff I had seen on American Bandstand where the kids were really cool in their dance steps. So I, after my first full-press getting ready for a date (mouthwash, deodorant, hair oil, etc.) picked up Betsy and we walked the half mile or so to the junior high school we attended. The dance, as always, was held in the gym festooned to try to hide the fact that it was a gym and not a dance hall. Unsuccessfully. I was excited just to be seen with Betsy and I noticed guys, guys I hung around with too, checking me out on my good luck. Once the dance began there were several songs played on the cranky record player which because we are talking about the pristine age of roll and roll which did not require dancing close together I was able to get through.

Then the other shoe fell, fell on Betsy. The junior DJ who was working the record player played a slow one, played Save The Last Dance For Me (of course I would remember the name of the song that would do me in). So we started to dance which Betsy was very good at. Needless to say I was not and accidently tripped over her feet causing her to fall. That fall was the bitter end. For the rest of the evening-the very long evening- Betsy made a point of limping every chance she got. Worse, worse in the seventh grade social universe, she let Lenny Balfour take home. Done for.

With that sad ass backdrop story in mind I decided that in the few weeks remaining until the Spring Frolic I would take some dance lessons from a friend of mine’s older sister. I swore him to secrecy and he held up his end of the bargain. His sister did the best she could and although I had improved somewhat every step I took was cause for a nervous breakdown on my part, maybe hers too. So the big night came. I was dressed to look good (what the hell you do learn some social graces for if not for being around girls, women) and Theresa came in a little later with a girlfriend looking I swear like a delicate bud, like some Botticelli Venus. We both blushed a bit when she spotted me. Once again, pretty much the norm in rock and roll times at dances, the first few were fast ones where you could just gyrate on your own and cause no pain. Just before intermission the paid profession DJ played a slow one to end the first half of the dance. Played Moon River I think. Things did not go well so I will confess to a little forgetfulness on the song played. But here is why things did not go well. Theresa stepped all over my feet. At intermission both of us flustered Theresa said maybe we should go down to the nearby beach instead of staying at the dance since she said she had something to explain to me.             

As we walked down to the beach Theresa, half in tears, told me because of her family’s religious views she had never really learned how to do any close dancing. She had asked her girlfriend, and had sworn her to secrecy, to teach her some steps, but she just could not get the hang of it and had been worried that I might find fault with her since I was such a good dancer. (She didn’t know only because of her being all over my feet I didn’t get a chance at hers.) She was sorry that she had two-left feet. I mentioned, no, I confessed to her, my own fragile efforts. We laughed. Then I suggested maybe we should start a club for people with two-left feet. She replied “with only two members.” Oh, yes, yes indeed. That remark got us through high school together-even through the senior prom.            

*The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-One Night With You

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-One Night With You

OR

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 Sam Lowell thought it was funny how things worked out in such contrary fashion in this wicked old world, not his expression that “wicked old world” for he preferred of late the more elastic and ironic “sad old world” but that of his old time North Adamsville corner boy Peter Markin who will be more fully introduced in a moment (Markin aka Peter Paul Markin although nobody ever called him that except his mother, as one would expect although he hated to be teased by every kid from elementary school on including girls, girls who liked him too as a result, and his first ill-advised wife, a scion of the Mayfair swells who tried, unsuccessfully, to impress her leafy suburban parents with the familiar waspy triple names).

Neither of those expressions referred to date back to their youth since neither Sam nor Peter back then, back in their 1960s youth, would have used such old-fashioned religious-drenched expressions to express their take on the world since as with all youth, or at least youth who expected to “turn the world upside down” (an expression that they both did use in very different contexts) they would have withheld such judgments or were too busy doing that “turning” business they had no time for adjectives to express their worldly concerns. No that expression, that understanding about the wickedness of the world had been picked up by Sam from Peter when they had reconnected a number of years before after they had not seen each other for decades to express the uphill battles of those who had expected humankind to exhibit the better angels of their nature on a more regular basis. Some might call this nostalgic glancing back, especially by Peter since he had more at stake in a favorable result, on a world that did not turn upside down or did so in a way very different from those hazy days.   

The funny part (or ironic if you prefer) was that back then Sam had been in his youth the least political, the least culturally-oriented, the least musically-oriented of those corner boys like Markin, Jack Dawson, Jimmy Jenkins and “max daddy” leader Fritz Fallon (that “max daddy” another expression coined by Peter so although he has not even been properly introduced we know plenty about his place in the corner boy life, his place as “flak,” for Fritz’s operation although Fritz always called him “the Scribe” when he wanted something written and needed to play on Peter’s vanity) who kept the coins flowing into the jukebox at Phil’s House of Pizza. That shop had been located down a couple of blocks from the choppy ocean waters of Adamsville Beach (and still is although under totally different management from the arch-Italian Rizzo family that ran the place for several generations before they sold it to some immigrant Albanians named Hoxha).

That pizza parlor made it among other things a natural hang-out place for wayward but harmless poor teenage corner boys. (The serious “townie” professional corner boys, the rumblers, tumblers, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters hung around Harry’s Variety with leader Red Riley over on Sagamore far from beaches, daytime beaches although rumors had been heard of more than one nighttime orgy with “nice” girls looking for kicks with rough boys down among the briny rocks, Fritz and the boys would not have gone within three blocks of that place. Maybe more from fear, legitimate fear as Fritz’s older brother, Timmy, a serious tough guy himself, could testify the one time he tried to wait outside Harry’s for some reason and got chain-whipped by Red for his indiscretion.) Moreover this spot provided a beautiful vantage point for scanning the horizon for those wayward girls who also kept their coins flowing into Phil’s jukebox (or a stray “nice” girl after Red and his corner boys threw her over).

Sam had recently thought about that funny story that Markin had told the crowd once on a hot night when nobody had any money and were just holding up the wall at Phil’s about Johnny Callahan, the flashy and unstoppable halfback from the high school team (and a guy even Red respected having made plenty of money off of sports who bet with him on Johnny’s prowess any given Saturday although Johnny once confessed that he, rightly, avoided Harry’s after what had happened to Timmy). See Johnny was pretty poor in those days even by the median working poor standard of the old neighborhoods (although now, courtesy of his incessant radio and television advertising which continues to make everyone within fifty miles of North Adamsville who knew Johnny back in the day aware of his new profession, he is a prosperous Toyota car dealer down across from the mall in Hull about twenty miles from North Adamsville, the town where their mutual friend Josh Breslin soon to be introduced came from).

Johnny, a real music maniac who would do his football weight-lifting exercises to Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire, Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula and stuff like that to get him hyped up, had this routine in order to get to hear songs that he was dying to hear, stuff he would hear late at night coming from a rock station out of Detroit and which would show up a few weeks later on Phil’s jukebox just waiting for Johnny and the kids to fill the coffers, with the girls who had some dough, enough dough anyway to put coins into that jukebox.

Johnny would go up all flirty to some young thing (a Fritz expression coped from Jerry Lee and not an invention of Markin as Peter would later claim to some “young thing” that he was trying to “score”) or depending on whatever intelligence he had on the girl, maybe she had just had a fight with her boyfriend or had broken up with him so Johnny would be all sympathy, maybe she was just down in the dumps for no articulable reason like every teen goes through every chance they get, whatever it took. Johnny, by the way, would have gotten that intelligence via Peter who whatever else anybody had to say about him, good or bad, was wired into, no, made himself consciously privy to, all kinds of boy-girl information almost like he had a hook into that Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest (everybody already knew that he was hooked into the boys’ Monday morning version and had started more rumors and other unsavory deeds than any ten other guys).

Now here is what Johnny “knew” about almost every girl if they had the quarter which allowed them to play three selections. He would let them pick that first one on their own, maybe something to express interest in his flirtation, maybe her name, say Donna, was also being used as the title of a latest hit, or if broken up some boy sorrow thing. Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted, stuff like that. The second one he would “suggest” something everybody wanted to listen to no matter what but which was starting to get old. Maybe an Elvis, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee thing still on the jukebox playlist but getting wearisome. Then he would go in for the kill and “suggest” they play this new platter, you know, something like Martha and the Vandelas Dancing in the Streets or Roy’s Blue Bayou both of which he had heard on the midnight radio airwaves out of Detroit one night and were just getting play on the jukeboxes. And bingo before you know it she was playing the thing again, and again. Beautiful. And Johnny said that sometimes he would wind up with a date, especially if he had just scored about three touchdowns for the school, a date that is in the days before he and Kitty Kelly became an item. An item, although it is not germane to the story, who still is Johnny’s girl, wife, known as Mrs. Toyota now.

But enough of this downstream stuff Sam thought. The hell with Johnny and his cheapjack tricks (although not to those three beautiful touchdowns days, okay) this thing gnawing at him was about old age angst and not the corner boy glory days at Phil’s, although it is about old time corners boys and their current doings, some of them anyway. So yeah he had other things he wanted to think about (and besides he had already, with a good trade-in gotten his latest car from Mr. Toyota so enough there), to tell a candid world about how over the past few years with the country, the world, the universe had been going to hell in a hand-basket. In the old days, like he kept going back to before he was not the least bit interested in anything in the big world outside of sports, and girls, of course. And endlessly working on plans to own his own business, a print shop, before he was twenty-five. Well, he did get that small business, although not until thirty and had prospered when he made connections to do printing for several big high-tech companies, notably IBM when they began outsourcing their work. He had prospered, had married (twice, and divorced twice), had the requisite tolerated children and adored grandchildren, and in his old age a woman companion to ease his time.

But there had been for a long time, through those failed marriages, through that business success something gnawing at him, something that Sam felt he had missed out on, or felt he had do something about. Then a few years ago when it was getting time for a high school class reunion he had Googled “North Adamsville Class of 1966” and came upon a class website for that year, his year, that had been set up by the reunion committee, and decided to joint to keep up with what was going on with developments there (he would wind up not going to that reunion as he had planned to although that too is not germane to the story here except as one more thing that gnawed at him because in the end he could not face going home , believed what Thomas Wolfe said in the title of one of his novels, you can’t go home again).

After he had registered on the site giving a brief resume of his interests and what he had been up to these past forty years or so years Sam  looked at the class list, the entire list of class members alive and deceased (a rose beside their name signifying their passing)  of who had joined and found the names of Peter Markin (he had to laugh, listed as Peter Paul Markin since everybody was listed by their full names, revenge from the grave by his poor mother, and that leafy suburban first wife who tried to give him Mayflower credentials, he thought) and Jimmy Jenkins among those who had done so. (Jack Dawson had passed away a few years before, a broken man, broken after his son who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide, according to Peter, as had their corner boy leader, Fritz Fallon, homeless after going through a couple of fortunes, his own and a third wife’s). Through the mechanism established on the site which allowed each class member who joined to have a private e-mail slot Sam contacted both men and the three of them started a rather vigorous on-line chat line for several weeks going through the alphabet of their experiences, good and bad (the time for sugar-coating was over unlike in their youth when all three would lie like crazy, especially about sex and with whom in order to keep their place in the pecking order, and in order to keep up with Fritz whom lied more than the three of them combined. Peter knew that, knew it better than anybody else but to keep his place as “scribe” in that crazy quill pecking order went along with such silly teenage stuff, stuff that in his other pursuits he would have laughed at but that is what made being a teenager back then, now too, from what he saw of his grandchildren’s trials and tribulations).

After a while, once the e-mail questions had worked their course, all three men met in Boston at the Sunnyvale Grille, a place where Markin had begun to hang out in after he had moved back to Boston (read: did his daytime drinking) over by the waterfront, and spent a few hours discussing not so much old times per se but what was going on in the world, and how the world had changed some much in the meantime. And since Markin, the political maniac of the tribe, was involved in the conversations maybe do something about it at least that is what Sam had hoped since he knew that is where he thought he needed to head in order to cut into that gnawing feeling. Sam was elated, and unlike in his youth he did not shut his ears down, when those two guys would talk politics, about the arts or about music. He had not listened back then since he was so strictly into girls and sports, not always in that order (which caused many problems later including one of the grounds for one of his divorces, not the sports but the girls).

This is probably the place for Sam to introduce Peter Markin although he had already given an earful (and what goes for Peter goes to a lesser extent for Jimmy who tended to follow in Pete’s wake on the issues back then, and still does). Peter as Sam already noted provided that noteworthy, national security agency-worthy service, that “intelligence” he provided all the guys (and not just his corner boys, although they had first dibs) about girls, who was “taken,” a very important factor if some frail (a Fritz term from watching too many 1940s gangster and detective movies and reading Dashiell Hammett too closely, especially The Maltese Falcon),was involved with some bruiser football player, some college joe who belonged to a fraternity and the brothers were sworn to avenge any brother’s indignities, or worse, worse of all, if she was involved with some outlaw biker who hung out in Adamsville and who if he hadn’t his monthly quota of  college boy wannabes red meat hanging out at Phil’s would not think twice about chain-whipping you just for the fuck of it (“for the fuck of it” a  term Jimmy constantly used so it was not always Markin or Fritz who led the verbal life around the corner), who was “unapproachable,”  probably more important than that social blunder of ‘hitting on” a taken woman since that snub by Miss Perfect-Turned-Up-Nose would make the rounds of that now legendary seminar, Monday morning before school girls’ locker room (and eventually work its way though Markin to the boys’ Monday morning version ruining whatever social standing the guy had spent since junior high trying to perfect in order to avoid the fatal nerd-dweeb-wallflower-square name your term). Strangely Markin made a serious mistake with Melinda Loring who blasted her freeze deep on him and he survived to tell the tale, or at least that is what he had the boys believe. Make of this what you will he never after that Melinda Loring had a high school girlfriend from North Adamsville High, who, well, liked to “do the do” as they called it back then, that last part not always correct since everybody, girls and boys alike, were lying like crazy about whether they were “doing the do” or not, including Markin.

But beyond, well beyond, that schoolboy silliness Markin was made of sterner stuff (although Sam would not have bothered to use such a positive attribute about Markin back then) was super-political, super into art and what he called culture, you know going to poetry readings at coffeehouses, going over Cambridge to watch foreign films with subtitles and themes that he would try to talk about and even Jimmy would turn his head, especially those French films by Jean Renoir, and super into music, fortunately he was not crazy for classical music (unlike some nerds in school then who were in the band) but serious about what is now called classic rock and roll and then in turn, the blues, and folk music (Sam still shuttered at that hillbilly stuff Markin tried to interest him in when he thought about it).

That was how Peter had first met Josh Breslin, still a friend, whom he introduced to Sam at one of their meetings over at the Sunnyvale Grille. Josh told the gathering that Markin had met him after high school, after he had graduated from Hull High (the same town where Johnny Callahan was burning up the Toyota sales records for New England) down at the Surf Ballroom (Sam had his own memories of the place, some good, some bad including one affair that almost wound up in marriage). Apparently Josh and Peter had had their wanting habits on the same girl at one Friday night dance when the great local cover band, the Rockin’ Ramrods held sway there, and had been successively her boyfriend for a short period both to be dumped for some stockbroker from New York. But their friendship remained and they had gone west together, gone on that Jack Kerouac On The Road  for a number of years when they were trying their own version of turning the world upside down on. Josh also dabbled (his word) in the turning upside down politics of the time.

And that was the remarkable thing about Peter, not so much later in cahoots with Josh because half of youth nation, half the generation of ’68 was knee-deep in some movement, but in staid old North Adamsville High days, days when to just be conventionally political, wanting to run for office or something, was kind of strange. See Peter was into the civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and social justice stuff that everybody thought he was crazy to be into, everybody from Ma to Fritz (and a few anonymous midnight phone-callers yelling n----r-lover in the Markin home phone).  He had actually gone into Boston when he was a freshman and joined the picket-line in front of Woolworths’ protesting the fact that they would not let black people eat in their lunchrooms down south (and maybe Markin would say when he mentioned what he was up to they were not that happy to have blacks in their northern lunchrooms either ), had joined a bunch of Quakers and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (a term then in use for airhead blue-haired lady do-gooders with nothing but time on their hands) calling on the government to stop building atomic bombs (not popular in the red scare Cold War we were fighting against the Russians North Adamsville, or most other American places either), running over to the art museum to check out the exhibits (including some funny stories about him and Jimmy busting up the place looking at the old Pharaoh times slave building Pyramids stuff uncovered by some Harvard guys way back), and going to coffeehouses in Harvard Square and listening to hokey folk music that was a drag. (Sam’s take on that subject then, and now.) So Peter was a walking contradiction, although that was probably not as strange now as it seemed back then when every new thing was looked at with suspicion and when kids like Peter were twisted in the wind between being corner boys and trying to figure out what that new wind was that was blowing though the land, when Sam and the other corner boys, except Jimmy and sometimes Jack would try to talk him out of stuff that would only upset everybody in town.

But here is the beauty, beauty for Sam now that he was all ears about what Peter had to say, he had kept at it, had kept the faith, while everybody else from their generation, or almost everybody, who protested war, protested around the social issues, had hung around coffeehouses and who had listened to folk music had long before given it up. Markin had, after his  Army time, spent a lot of time working with GIs around the war issues, protested American foreign policy at the drop of a hat and frequented off-beat coffeehouses set up in the basements of churches in order to hear the dwindling number of folk artists around. He had gotten and kept his “religion,” kept the faith in a sullen world. And like in the old days a new generation (added to that older North Adamsville generation which still, from the class website e-mail traffic had not gotten that much less hostile to what Peter had to say about this wicked old world, you already know the genesis of that term, right, was ready to curse him out, ready to curse the darkness against his small voice).

One night when Peter and Sam were alone at the Sunnyvale, maybe both had had a few too many high-shelf scotches (able to afford such liquor unlike in the old days when they both in their respective poverties, drank low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskey with a beer chaser when they had the dough, if not some cheapjack wine), Peter told Sam the story of how he had wanted to go to Alabama in high school, go to Selma, but his mother threatened to disown him if he did, threatened to disown him not for his desire to go but because she would not have been able to hold her head up in public if he had, and so although it ate at him not to go, go when his girlfriend, Helen Jackman, who lived in Gloversville, did go, he took a dive (Peter’s words). Told a redemptive story too about his anti-war fight in the Army when he refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in an Army stockade for a couple of years altogether. (Sam thought that was a high price to pay for redemption but it may have been the scotch at work.) Told a number of stories about working with various veterans’ groups, throwing medals over Supreme Court barricades, chainings to the White House fence, sitting down in hostile honked traffic streets, blocking freeways complete with those same hostile honkings, a million walks for this and that, and some plain old ordinary handing out leaflets, working the polls and button-holing reluctant politicians to vote against the endless war budgets (this last the hardest task, harder than all the jailings, honkings, marches put together and seemingly the most fruitless). Told too stories about the small coffeehouse places seeing retread folkies who had gone on to other things and then in a fit of anguish, or hubris, decided to go back on the trail. Told of many things that night not in feast of pride but to let Sam know that sometimes it was easier to act than to let that gnawing win the day. Told Sam that he too always had the gnaw, probably always would in this wicked old world. Sam was delighted by the whole talk, even if Peter was on his soapbox. 

That night too Peter mentioned in passing that he contributed to a number of blogs, a couple of political ones, including an anti-war veterans’ group, a couple of old time left-wing cultural sites and a folk music-oriented one. Sam confessed to Peter that although he had heard the word blog he did not know what a blog was. Peter told him that one of the virtues of the Internet was that it provided space (cyberspace, a term Sam had heard of and knew what it meant) for the average citizen to speak his or her mind via setting up a website or a blog. Blogs were simply a way to put your opinions and comments out there just like newspaper Op/Ed writers or news reporters and commentators although among professional reporters the average blog and blog writers were seen as too filled with opinions and sometimes rather loose with the facts. Peter said he was perfectly willing to allow the so-called “objective” reporters to state the facts but he would be damned if the blog system was not a great way to get together with others interested in your areas of interest, yeah, stuff that interested you and that other like-minded spirits might respond to. Yeah that was worth the effort.

The actual process of blog creation (as opposed to the more complex website-creation which still takes a fair amount of expertise to create) had been made fairly simple over time, just follow a few simple prompts and you are in business. Also over time what was possible to do has been updated for ease, for example linking other platforms to your site and be able to present multi-media works lashing up say your blog with YouTube or downloading photographs to add something to your presentation. Peter one afternoon after Sam had asked about his blog links showed him the most political one that he belonged to, one he had recently begun to share space with Josh Breslin, Frank Jackman and a couple of other guys that he had known since the 1960s and who were familiar with the various social, political and cultural trends that floated out from that period. 

Sam was amazed at the various topics that those guys tackled, stuff that he vaguely remembered hearing about but which kind of passed him by as he delved into the struggle to build his printing shop. He told Peter that he got dizzy looking at the various titles from reviews of old time black and white movies that he remembered watching at the old Strand second run theater uptown, poetry from the “beat” generation, various political pieces on current stuff like the Middle East, the fight against war, political prisoners most of whom he had never heard of except the ones who had been Black Panther or guys like that, all kinds of reviews of rock and roll complete with the songs via YouTube, too many reviews of folk music that he never really cared for, books that he knew Peter read like crazy but could not remember the titles. The guys really had put a lot of stuff together, even stuff from other sites and announcements for every conceivable left-wing oriented event. He decided that he would become a Follower which was nothing sinister like some cult but just that you would receive notice when something was put on the blog.

Peter also encouraged him to write some pieces about what interested him, maybe start out about the old days in North Adamsville since all the guys mined that vein for sketches (that is what Peter liked to call most of the material on site since they were usually too short to be considered short stories but too long to be human interest snapshots. Sam said he would think about the matter, think about it seriously once he read the caption below:                                                                           

“This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of our interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn our attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.”

Sam could relate to that, had something to say about some of those songs. Josh Breslin laughed when he heard that Sam was interested in doing old time rock and roll sketches. He then added, “If we can only get him to move off his butt and come out and do some street politics with us we would be getting somewhere.” Peter just replied, “one step at a time.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.