A View From The International Left-Liberation of Dalits: Key to Indian Workers Revolution Ants Among Elephants For a Leninist Party to Fight Caste Oppression! A Review

Workers Vanguard No. 1132	20 April 2018

Liberation of Dalits: Key to Indian Workers Revolution

Ants Among Elephants

For a Leninist Party to Fight Caste Oppression!

A Review

In modern India, with its gleaming IT centers and manufacturing hubs, there are widespread illusions that untouchability is a thing of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. Untouchability is at the core of the caste system, which has been perpetuated and entrenched within every sphere of Indian capitalist society. Sujatha Gidla’s 2017 book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, shatters many of the myths that serve to make untouchability invisible. Her book is a sharply drawn picture of caste oppression and of her family’s unending struggles against it. It is a compelling read and has been widely acclaimed by reviewers.

Untouchability is not simply a condition of poverty that can be overcome by education and social mobility. As Gidla matter-of-factly states: “I was born into a lower-middle-class family. My parents were college lecturers. I was born an untouchable.” She uses the word “untouchable” rather than “Dalit” because it emphasizes the reality of what it means to be part of that population. Untouchability was formally abolished by the constitution of India, which gained its independence from Britain in 1947, and since that time much has changed in the country. But little has changed for the vast majority of India’s 220 million Dalits, for whom freedom from the yoke of caste oppression is yet to come.

Ants Among Elephants is both a family memoir and a political history of the author’s uncle, K.G. Satyamurthy (1931-2012), who became a famous leader of a Maoist guerrilla group. As such, the book shines a harsh spotlight on the atrocious record of India’s Stalinist parties on the question of untouchability. The Communist Party of India (CPI) and its offshoot the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) reject the fight for proletarian independence, and thus the fight for socialist revolution. Instead, they subordinate the interests of the oppressed and exploited masses to an alliance with the national bourgeoisie. From its inception, the CPI has acted as an appendage of the Congress Party, which has always been permeated with brahminical (high-caste) Hindu nationalism. Both the CPI and CPI(M) have utterly refused to fight against caste oppression, falsely counterposing such a fight to the class struggle. This is the opposite of Leninism. We stand on the tradition of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who insisted that the revolutionary workers party must champion the cause of all the oppressed in society, acting as the “tribune of the people.”

Untouchability is a form of special oppression that is not simply reducible to class exploitation, though it overlaps with it. A classic example of special oppression is the subjugation of women, which is a key prop of capitalist rule; a working-class woman, for example, bears the double burden of her oppression as a woman and as a worker. India is permeated with myriad forms of oppression, including those based on religion, language, ethnicity and nationality. In heavily Muslim Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan, the Indian army this month gunned down twelve people in one day.

For Marxists, addressing the oppression of Dalits is a matter of strategic importance. Without a program for the liberation of Dalits, there will be no socialist revolution in India. Dalits are a central component of the working class. To date, there is no history or tradition of genuine Leninism as applied to caste oppression. As part of the struggle to forge a genuinely Leninist party in India, we Marxists of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) are committed to the fight to end the caste system and for the liberation of Dalits.

The Indignities of Caste Oppression

The age-old caste system is historically rooted in India’s rural village economy. The wealthy upper castes dominate the lower castes and the countless subcastes, each one bowing their heads to those above and grinding the faces of those below. But none of these caste divisions is as fundamental, or as envenomed, as the chasm between caste and outcaste. A special place in hell is reserved for “untouchables,” who are forcibly segregated, socially and often physically, beneath all castes. As Gidla writes:

“The untouchables, whose special role—whose hereditary duty—is to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all. They must live outside the boundaries of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils. There are thousands of other such restrictions and indignities that vary from place to place. Every day in an Indian newspaper you can read of an untouchable beaten or killed for wearing sandals, for riding a bicycle.”

In Gujarat last year, a Dalit man was thrashed by upper-caste thugs for “sporting a moustache.” In late March, a Dalit youth was bludgeoned to death for owning and riding a horse.

Gidla’s great-grandparents, tribal forest dwellers, were born in the late 1880s. They were not Hindus but worshipped their own deities. The family was driven out of its dwellings by the British colonial rulers in order to clear the forests for teak production. Her forebears worked an unused area of land and grew crops, only to be forced to pay revenue to the hated zamindar (landowner), who collected taxes on behalf of the British. The family was driven into debt and forced to surrender its land to the zamindar, and they became landless laborers. The enslavement of tribal people (the adivasi) continues to exist to this day.

Gidla’s family converted to Christianity and Sujatha, the author, grew up in a Dalit slum in what was then part of the state of Andhra Pradesh, where being Christian is synonymous with being “untouchable.” She “knew no Christian who did not turn servile in the presence of a Hindu” and “knew no Hindu who did not look right through a Christian man standing in front of him as if he did not exist.” It was only at the age of 15 that Gidla discovered, to her great shock, that there are Christian Brahmins—the Nambudiripad caste, which exists mainly in Kerala.

So entrenched is the caste system in the Indian subcontinent that it is practiced by virtually all religious groups in the region, including Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists. India’s Muslims are in their vast majority regarded as “untouchable” and targeted for communal violence. This month, protests of outrage erupted over the torture, rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl, Asifa, from a nomadic Muslim family—a depraved and calculated act of terror by Hindu chauvinists in Kashmir. In Bangladesh, outcastes include the Rohingya, many of whom have been massacred in Myanmar. Pakistan’s impoverished Christians, who face Muslim-chauvinist terror, including for “blasphemy,” are also overwhelmingly deemed outcastes. Oppression based on caste is rife in Nepal as well as in Sri Lanka, where it is practiced by both Tamils and Sinhalese. Gidla, who lives in New York and works as a conductor in the subway system, points out that caste prejudice is rampant among Indians living in the U.S.

Gidla’s grandparents were allowed to attend a school run by Christian missionaries. Education enabled them—and their children—to rise above the unspeakable poverty that afflicts the vast majority of Dalits. But the family could not escape the burden of their untouchability. The story of the author’s mother, Manjula, a central character in the book, gives a sense of the oppression that Dalit women face: blatant caste and sex discrimination. Manjula and the other women in the family had to clean, cook and care for the extended family. Her older brother chose Manjula’s husband, who beat her to appease his own mother. Overcoming these immense obstacles, Manjula acquired a postgraduate degree.

Gidla’s family lived in the city and was thus spared the most heinous violence that is intrinsic to the caste system in the villages. Women are particularly targeted for sadistic crimes by upper-caste men who use rape as a means to humiliate both the woman and her caste. At the same time, inter-caste relationships are deadly dangerous. In February, a 20-year-old woman writhed in agony for hours before dying of poison that her father, assisted by the mother, forced down her throat. The father told the police that this was “just punishment for loving a man outside the community,” i.e., a Dalit.

In the city, one’s caste is less obvious. But by tradition everyone has the right to know, and if you lie, countless clues would give your caste away. In the universities, Dalit students are entering citadels of brahminism. In 2016 Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student at Hyderabad Central University, was hounded to death in a witchhunt spearheaded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Vemula’s suicide note said: “My birth is my fatal accident.” This February in Uttar Pradesh, a Dalit university student, Dileep Saroj, was beaten to death for having accidentally touched a caste Hindu. As Gidla put it: “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.”

On average, every 15 minutes a crime is committed against Dalits, who have been facing increasing attacks since the BJP came to power in 2014. On April 2, Dalits staged an enormous bandh (shutdown protest) across India against a court ruling that weakens the Prevention of Atrocities Act, which ostensibly facilitates the prosecution of crimes committed against Dalits. Protesters were met with massive repression by the police, who killed at least twelve people, injured dozens and arrested thousands. While the legislation does little to protect Dalits from being murdered and maimed with impunity, the court ruling gives the green light to caste-chauvinist gangs for even more violent attacks. Indeed, upper-caste politicians and spokesmen have long been howling to repeal the law.

Stalinism: A Rotten Tradition on Caste

Sujatha Gidla’s uncle, K.G. Satyamurthy, who is a focus of Ants Among Elephants, was a college student when he was drawn to the Congress-led Quit India campaign against British rule. Quickly disillusioned with Congress, Satyamurthy decided to join the Communist Party of India. In so doing, he accepted the view that “one was supposed to think only in terms of class and not of caste. When the class struggle was won, discrimination based on caste would disappear.” With this rotten line, India’s Stalinist parties have tarnished the banner of communism on the question of caste, as they have on every other question of revolution. The deep caste chauvinism prevalent in society constitutes an enormous obstacle to forging the unity the working class needs in its struggles against capital. The struggle for socialist liberation in India requires the building of a Leninist vanguard party to lead the proletariat in the fight against the oppression of the Dalit masses.

Satyamurthy joined the CPI because—unusually for the Stalinists—the party joined a revolt of the oppressed in Telangana (which was then part of Andhra Pradesh). The Telangana struggle (1946-51) was an insurrection against the monstrous rule of the Nizam of Hyderabad. The Nizam’s rule was reinforced by the British, providing a textbook example of how colonial rule strengthened the caste system. As Gidla writes: “There were systems of servitude in every part of India, but none was as ruthless as the vetti system in Telangana, the heartland of the Nizam’s kingdom of the Deccan.” Under the vetti system, “every untouchable family in the village had to give up their first male child as soon as he learned to talk and walk.” The child would become a slave in the household of the dora, the Nizam’s local agent. Similarly, all the women of the village were the property of the dora. Gidla notes that if the dora “called while they were eating they had to leave the food on their plates and come to his bed.”

The CPI in Andhra Pradesh became involved in the Telangana armed struggle and built a guerrilla army that soon controlled large areas of the countryside. In 1948, the ruling Congress Party under Jawaharlal Nehru dispatched the army to Telangana. The Nizam had initially refused to bring his kingdom into the newly independent state of India, but quickly surrendered his “princely state” to the Indian army, which then turned to its main mission: crushing the Communist-led rebellion. Over the next three years the army massacred untold numbers of Muslims, peasants and tribal people. In the wake of the slaughter, the CPI reverted back to its historic role as an appendage of Congress, which had previously ordered that Communists be hanged from trees. Gidla bitterly notes that the CPI leadership “gave in to Nehru without even demanding amnesty for the ten thousand party members who were rotting in detention camps.”

Satyamurthy was devastated that the CPI abandoned the armed struggle and even more shocked to discover that the turn was sanctioned by Stalin. In 1964, the CPI split into pro-Soviet and pro-China wings. Satyamurthy sided with the pro-China faction that would become the CPI(M), hoping that the “Chinese path” would mean following the example of Mao, who had led a peasant army to victory. But the CPI(M) voted at its first conference to follow the parliamentary road.

When the CPI(M) became part of a capitalist government in West Bengal in 1967, a layer of party cadre split and launched an armed uprising in Naxalbari, becoming known as Naxalites. The split attracted a large portion of CPI(M) members in Andhra Pradesh, including Satyamurthy and many veterans of the Telangana struggle. Both the CPI and CPI(M) drew a blood line against the Naxalites. In the 1970s, the CPI supported their ruthless suppression at the hands of Congress leader Indira Gandhi. In August 1971, CPI(M) cadre joined with Congress goons in a massacre of Naxalite suspects and sympathizers in Calcutta.

And when it came to crimes against Dalits, the CPI(M) during its decades in power in West Bengal mirrored the Indian ruling class. In 1979, the CPI(M)-led government massacred hundreds of Dalit Hindu refugees from Bangladesh who were living on the island of Marichjhapi. In 2007, in Nandigram, West Bengal, CPI(M) goons joined cops in a massacre of perhaps 100 people who were protesting against land-grabbing for capitalist enterprise.

In 1980, Satyamurthy cofounded the People’s War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh with Kondapalli Seetharamayya, a caste Hindu who was a veteran of the CPI and the Telangana uprising. The PWG, which became one of the best-known Naxalite groups—and the Naxalites in general—won significant support among Dalits, for whom the armed guerrillas offered a much-needed measure of protection against the brutal violence of the upper-caste landlords and the state. However, the Maoist program offers no way forward. The Maoists have no political program other than to look for “progressive” bourgeois allies, invariably sacrificing the interests of the poorest peasants to unity with “broader forces.” According to the Naxalites, Dalits must unite with the “intermediate” castes in a struggle against the “feudal” large landowners. In reality, the “intermediate” castes are often bitterly and violently hostile to Dalits and tribal people owning land.

While the Naxalites traditionally drew their support largely from Dalits (and today mainly from among the adivasi people), they have refused to politically address the question of untouchability. The issue exploded inside the PWG in 1984 when young Dalit party members complained to Satyamurthy of caste-chauvinist practices in the functioning of the party: comrades of the barber caste were assigned to shave other comrades; those from the washer caste to wash clothes; Dalit members were told to sweep floors and clean lavatories.

Satyamurthy, who had personally experienced caste chauvinism from his comrades, scheduled a Central Committee meeting to discuss the issue. The party leadership responded by having him “expelled on the spot for ‘conspiring to divide the party’,” as Gidla reports. In refusing to even discuss caste prejudice in its own ranks, the Maoist PWG was true to its political roots in the CPI.

M.N. Roy’s Distortions of Leninism

Ants Among Elephants brilliantly exposes the political bankruptcy of Indian would-be Marxists on the question of caste oppression. The task that genuine communists face is to outline a Bolshevik perspective for India. Marxists must address the daily oppression of Dalits and adivasi people up to and after the victory of socialist revolution. The ICL looks to the lessons of the first four congresses of the Communist International (CI). We seek to forge a party in India armed with a program of permanent revolution, the program that laid the basis for victory in the Bolshevik-led 1917 October Revolution. Under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolsheviks established the dictatorship of the proletariat with the support of the poorer peasantry and downtrodden ethnic minorities. The Soviet government issued far-reaching decrees, granting the right of self-determination to the oppressed nations, full legal equality for women and land to landless peasants.

In 1920, Lenin drafted a set of theses on the agrarian question, which could have been written for India today. As opposed to the Maoist strategy of peasant war divorced from the struggles of the working class, the theses stipulate that “there is no salvation for the working masses of the countryside except in alliance with the Communist proletariat.” The theses continued: “The industrial workers cannot accomplish their epoch-making mission of emancipating mankind from the yoke of capital and from wars if they confine themselves to their narrow craft, or trade interests, and smugly restrict themselves to attaining an improvement in their own conditions.”

The founder of the Communist Party in India, M.N. Roy, brought a distortion of Leninism to the subcontinent and put the nascent movement on a course of capitulation to bourgeois nationalism. As early as 1922, Roy drafted a manifesto for the bourgeois-nationalist Congress Party urging the organization to put itself at the head of the working-class and peasant masses. Under Roy’s guidance, the CPI set out from its founding in December 1925 to build a Peasants’ and Workers’ Party in Bengal. Rather than fighting to build a proletarian party that could lead the peasant masses, Roy sought to build a two-class party (i.e., a bourgeois party) where the interests of the working class would necessarily be subordinated to those of the petty-bourgeois peasantry.

Roy’s political program was contrary to the perspective outlined at the 1920 Second Congress of the CI, which Roy himself attended. Lenin insisted: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form” (“Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions,” 1920).

When the CI came under the bureaucratic leadership of the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, Roy acted as Stalin’s representative in China in 1927. On Stalin’s instructions, the Chinese Communist Party remained within the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang even as its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, staged a coup in April 1927 and disarmed and massacred tens of thousands of Communist-led workers in Shanghai (see “M.N. Roy, Nationalist Menshevik,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 62, Spring 2011). The slaughter in China was the bitter fruit of the Stalinist program of subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeois nationalists. Two decades later, the Indian Stalinists reaped the reward for their support to the Indian nationalists in the bloody suppression of the Communist-led peasant uprising in Telangana at the hands of Nehru and his home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, known as the “Iron Man of India.”

The CPI’s capitulation to brahminical chauvinism precluded their fighting against the oppression of Dalits. This was evident in the late 1920s when Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the historic Dalit leader, led mass protests against untouchability in the state of Maharashtra. During that period, the Communists had acquired significant support among the combative proletariat in the Bombay textile mills, where Dalit workers were forbidden from working in the higher-paying weaving department and forced to drink water from separate pitchers. A Leninist party would have fought tooth and nail to win all workers to demand an end to untouchability in the workplace and for equal pay for all.

But CPI leaders would not carry out such a fight and did not even mobilize for the protests against untouchability. An exasperated Ambedkar disdained the CPI leaders as “mostly a bunch of Brahmin boys.” He concluded: “The Russians made a great mistake to entrust the Communist movement in India to them. Either the Russians didn’t want Communism in India—they wanted only drummer boys—or they didn’t understand” (quoted in Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades [1960]).

Amid the growing drive for Indian independence from British rule, the CPI grotesquely dismissed the fight against caste oppression as a diversion from the “anti-imperialist” struggle. Moreover, in the wretched tradition of Roy, the CPI ceded the leadership of the anti-colonial struggle to the bourgeois nationalists led by Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi. By turning a deaf ear to the struggle against untouchability, the CPI drove many Dalits into Ambedkar’s dead-end framework of reforming capitalism.

In 1931, the British masters of “divide and rule” offered Ambedkar a separate electorate for the “depressed classes,” as they had granted to Muslims. This would have allowed Dalits, who are geographically dispersed, to form a single electoral bloc. Astutely recognizing that Ambedkar’s followers might unite with Muslims to form a counterweight to Congress, Gandhi declared a “fast to the death” against the British proposal. In opposition to Ambedkar, Gandhi proclaimed himself to be the leader of those he patronizingly labeled “harijans” (children of God). Though he campaigned against certain aspects of untouchability—demanding, for example, temple entry—Gandhi was a staunch supporter of the brahminical caste system.

For his part, Ambedkar fostered illusions that the British could be used as a bulwark against the upper-caste Indian nationalists. With the outbreak of World War II, he supported the imperialists and joined the Viceroy’s Executive Council. In this, he was not unique. Gandhi, too, supported the British at the beginning of the war, though he could not win the Congress leadership to his position. It was not until 1942 that Congress launched the Quit India movement. As for the CPI, the Indian Stalinists also supported the “democratic” imperialists from the time of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 onward, betraying the interests of the colonial masses.

Following independence, the ruling Congress Party agreed to reserve seats in Parliament for “scheduled” tribes and castes and co-opted Ambedkar to draft the new constitution. In addition to banning untouchability, the written document promised many freedoms, including for women, but they remained largely a dead letter. Ambedkar himself later noted: “The same old tyranny, the same old oppression, the same old discrimination which existed before, exists now, and perhaps in a worse form.”

For a Trotskyist Perspective

India’s transition from preindustrial society did not lead to the dissolution of caste relations. The British colonial rulers—backed by the large landowners and nascent local bourgeoisie—preserved, manipulated and reinforced rural backwardness and the caste system. The post-independence period has shown that the Indian capitalist rulers are incapable of solving basic democratic questions. The land reforms introduced by Congress largely restricted redistribution to those within the landowning castes.

To this day, Dalits who manage to buy land are often attacked by mobs, and the legal transfer of ownership is routinely bogged down in wrangles for years. The proportion of landless people in rural India has increased from 28 percent of the rural population in 1951 to nearly 55 percent in 2011. And it continues to rise.

Indian capital is dependent on imperialist finance capital. Almost 70 percent of the population lives in small villages. However, the rural areas are no longer the main source of capital accumulation for the dominant rural castes, who are increasingly investing in industry. This fact underlines that the fight to expropriate the landlords—and provide land to the landless masses—is inseparable from the fight to expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class.

Side by side with its rural backwardness, India is now the fifth-largest manufacturer in the world. The Indian proletariat is small relative to the rural population, but it has the social power to lead the peasant masses and all the oppressed in a fight to overthrow capitalist exploitation. To exercise that power will take a struggle to overcome the insidious caste divisions in the working class.

As Leninists, the ICL fights to build a vanguard party that imbues the proletariat with the understanding that the struggle against Dalit oppression is in the interest of the entire working class of India. A case in point would be to mobilize to free 13 imprisoned union leaders from the Maruti Suzuki plant at Gurgaon-Manesar near Delhi. In 2012, a supervisor attacked a Dalit worker with casteist slurs. The union defended the worker. But the company, which has long sought to crush the union, hired thugs who provoked an altercation, after which the union leaders were outrageously framed up on a murder charge. Last year, the 13 unionists were sentenced to life in prison (see “India: Free Maruti Suzuki Union Leaders!” WV No. 1112, 19 May 2017).

The workers movement should also take a stand in defense of the Bhim Army, a Dalit rights organization that has been subjected to fierce repression by the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh. The Bhim Army’s leader, Chandrashekhar Azad, is being held in prison under the draconian National Security Act, despite having been acquitted of all the (bogus) charges against him. The unions and organizations of the oppressed must demand: Free Chandrashekhar Azad now!

Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants powerfully illustrates the central role caste oppression plays in Indian society. The liberation of the Dalit masses requires the forging of a revolutionary workers party dedicated to fighting all forms of oppression. In turn, Marxists committed to building such a party must fight to overcome the shameful legacy of Stalinism by planting the banner of the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. This program is thoroughly internationalist, aiming for proletarian revolution not only in India and the rest of South Asia but also in the imperialist centers of North America, West Europe and Japan. The true Leninist party that we aim to build will be composed in its majority of Dalits as well as oppressed minorities. Winning the trust of the Dalits and adivasi people will require special demands and forms of organization. A Leninist-Trotskyist party in India, section of a reforged Fourth International, will open up the possibility of a way out of the endless cycles of brutal oppression, injustice and poverty.

Science for the People Boston meeting May 15th 7pm, MIT Room 1-150

Charlie Welch

9:35 AM

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Dear Boston-area folks interested in Science for the People,

Science for the People (SftP) is an organization of leftist scientists
that was active in the 1960s-1980s and is getting revitalized by a
younger generation of scientist-activists.  It has several chapters
around the country.  We would like to invite you to a meeting of the
Boston-area chapter, which will happen on *Tuesday, May 15, 7:00-9:00
p.m*.*, in Room 1-150 (Building 1, Room 150) of MIT in Cambridge*.
Building 1 is on the northeast side of Mass Ave. near Memorial Drive.

The agenda is below:

1. Short introduction to SftP, national working groups, and the Boston
chapter
2. Self-introductions, including mention of issues you are most
concerned about/would most like to work on
3. Presentation by and discussion with early SftP member Jonathan
Beckwith on biological determinism, how SftP exposed and confronted it
in the past, and its persistence today (45 min.)
4. Wrap-up, next steps, next meeting

Looking forward to meeting, discussing, and taking action with you,
in solidarity,
Ilias, for Boston SftP
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Happy, Happy Birthday Brother Frankenstein-On the 200th Anniversary Of The “Birth” of Mary Shelley’s Avenging Angel “Frankenstein”-A Comment

Happy, Happy Birthday Brother Frankenstein-On the 200^th Anniversary Of The “Birth” of Mary Shelley’s Avenging Angel “Frankenstein”-A Comment 

A link to a 200^th anniversary discussion of Mary Shelley and her “baby” Frankenstein on NPR’s On Point. 

http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/02/12/working-in-the-lab-late-one-night

By Lenny Lynch

We all know in the year 2018 that it is impossible to create a human being, maybe any being, out of spare stitched up human parts, and a few jolts of electricity. At least I hope everybody short of say Hannibal Lecter, Lucy Lane or some such holy goof who thought he or she could “do God’s handiwork” on the cheap, out of some “how to manual” knows the ropes enough to have figured that out. You have to go big time MIT scientist and MGH doctor routes running through DNA, RNA, genetic matching and such to do what back in the day only a scary primitive amateur guy working in some foreboding isolated mountain retreat would even dare to contemplate. Back in that 1818 day when Mary Shelley (she of the thoroughbred breeding via Earth Mother feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and French Revolution-saturated  anarcho- philosopher William Godwin and later channeling Romantic era poet husband Percy Shelley who hung around with ill-fated heroic Lord Byron and that crowd ) wrote her iconic classis Frankenstein former idea, the stitch and sew part, seemed pretty far out on the surface and would go on to sell scads of books to titillate and disturb the sleep of fevered.  

I like the Modern Prometheus part of her title better since like I said science was pretty primitive on that count, not much better that the Greeks creation from earth’s laden clay process, about the way our brother was put together in a slapdash manner but provided an impetus to further discovery. Today where through genetic engineering we have a better understanding of science and medicine who knows what the possibilities are for good or evil. Although at times we need to treat science, maybe medicine too, like a thing from which we have to run. (Example, a very current example, running the rack on discovering everything there is to know about the atom and then have such a discovery threatening a hostage world with nuclear weapons once the night-takers latched on to the military possibilities. At that point running away from the results of the creation like cowardly Victor Frankenstein doesn’t mean a thing, not a thing.)      

Still Mary Shelley was onto something, some very worthy thoughts about human beings, about sentient and sapient beings, about where women fit into the whole scheme of things if we can at the flip of a button create life without human intervention which has already accrued to us today in marginal cases and probably would have shocked her 19^th sensibilities. A better result if humankind can make itself out of odd spare parts, a little DNA splicing here and there, that also puts a big crimp in the various ideas about God and his or her tasks once he or she becomes a sullen bystander to human endeavor. Not a bad thing not a bad thing at all. But the most beautiful part of her story is the possibility, once again, that we may get back to the Garden to retrofit that Paradise Lost that the blind revolutionary 17^th poet John Milton lost his eyesight over trying to in verse form how we lost our human grace. Yeah, tell us that we might be able to get back to the Garden. Nice choice Ms. Shelley. 

We know, or at least I know, that Frankenstein aka Modern Prometheus, has gotten a bad rap. Prometheus remember him from subtle Greek mythology and how he was able to create his brethren out of clay. Nice trick. Better, the brother did not leave humankind hanging by offering the gift of fire to move human progress at a faster clip. To keep the race from cold and hunger. Took a beating from psychopath Zeus for his lese majeste by having to roll that rock for eternity. Mister Frankenstein really has been misunderstood especially since the rise of the cinema starting from that first libelous presentation in 1931 which turned him from that misunderstood and challenged youth who was orphaned by a unfit “father” into a scary monster who made kids afraid on nighttime shadows on bedroom walls. There are a million ways that piece of bad celluloid got it wrong but if you will he remember actually learned English, despite being “born” out in the wilds of 19^th century Germany, so movie audiences could understand what he was saying. Does that sound like a monster to you? I thought not.

The bad ass in the whole caper is this dolt Victor Frankenstein, the human so-called scientist who built a thing from which he had to run like some silly schoolgirl. If the guy had the sense that God, yes God, gave geese he would not have abandoned his brethren, his avenging angel. Wouldn’t have started a string of murders for which he not his so-called “monster” was morally responsible for. Instead the dink just let the bodies stack up like a cord of wood as he let his “creation” get out of control.

On this site my fellow writer Danny Moriarty has recently taken it upon himself to smash what he has called the unearned reputation of one Lanny Lamont, aka Basil Rathbone, aka Sherlock Holmes the so-called deductive logic detective who also let innocent bodies pile up before he got a bright thought in his dope-addled head about how to stop the carnage. That Danny’s take, Danny not his real name by the way but an alias he had been forced to use to protect himself and his family who have been threatened by a bunch of hooligans who are cultist devotees and aficionados of this Lanny Lamont known as the Baker Street Irregulars.

I don’t know enough about the merits of Danny’s crusade to decide whether he too is also an avenging angel, a blessed brethren in the fight for human progress against the night-takers, against the “alternate fact” crowd. But I do know that the idea behind what he is trying to do is solid. In his case the bare knuckle blowing up of an undeserved legend. This bicentennial year of the existence our beautiful Mister Frankenstein, the Old Testament avenging angel, I am proud to defend his honor against all the abuse he has taken for far too long. That may be a tough road but so be it.         

Mary Shelley started something for us to think about on letting things get out of hand though and now we have to try to put the genie back in the bottle. 

Archive- To Be Young Was Very Heaven-With The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967 In Mind-When Prince Love Loved In The 1967 Summer Of Love

To Be Young Was Very Heaven-With The 50^th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967 In Mind-When Prince Love Loved In The 1967 Summer Of Love

By Social Commentator Zack James 

[I was about a decade or so too young to have been washed, washed clean to hear guys like Peter Paul Markin, more on him below, tell the tale, by the huge counter-cultural explosion that burst upon the land (and by extension and a million youth culture ties internationally before the bubble burst) in the mid to late 1960s and maybe extending a few year into the 1970s depending on whose ebb tide event you adhere to. (Markin’s for very personal reasons having to do with participating in the events was May Day 1971 when the most radical forces tried to stop the Vietnam War by shutting down the government and got kicked in the teeth for their efforts. Doctor Gonzo, the late writer Hunter Thompson who was knee-deep in the experiences called it 1968 around the Democratic Party convention disaster in Chicago. I, reviewing the material mostly and on the very fringe of what was what back then would argue for 1969 between Altamont and the Days of Rage everything looked bleak after that.)

Over the next fifty years that explosion has been inspected, selected, dissected, inflected, infected and detected by every social science academic who had the stamina to hold up under the pressure and even by politicians, mostly to put the curse of “bad example” and “never again” on the outlier experimentation that went on in those days. Plenty has been written about the sea-change in mores among the young attributed to the breakdown of the Cold War red scare freeze, black civil rights struggles rights early in the decade and the huge anti-Vietnam War movement later. Part too always a factor maybe even just as reaction like in many generations coming of age, just the tweaking of the older generations inured to change by the Cold War red scare psychosis they bought into. The event being celebrated or at least reflected on in this series under the headline “To Be Very Young-With The Summer of Love 1967 In Mind” now turned fifty was by many accounts a pivotal point in that explosion especially among the kids from out in the hinterlands, away from elite colleges and anything goes urban centers.   The kids, who as later analysis would show, were caught up one way or another in the Vietnam War, were scheduled to fight the damn thing, the young men anyway, and were beginning, late beginning, to break hard from the well-established norms from whence they came.

This series came about because my oldest brother, Alex James, had in the spring of 2017 taken a trip to San Francisco on business and noticed on a passing bus that the famed deYoung Museum located in the heart of Golden Gate Park, a central location for the activities of the Summer of Love as it exploded on the scene in that town, was holding an exhibition about that whole experience. That jarred many a half forgotten memory in Alex’s head. Alex and his “corner boys” back in the day from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville, a suburb of Boston where we all came of age, had gotten their immersion into counter-cultural activities by going to San Francisco in the wake of that summer of 1967 to “see what it was all about.”

When Alex got back from his business trip he gathered the few “corner boys” still standing, Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Ralph Kelly, and Josh Breslin (not an actual North Adamsville corner boy but a corner boy nevertheless from Olde Sacco up in Maine whom the tribe “adopted” as one of their own) at Jimmy’s Grille in Riverdale, their still favorite drinking hole as they call it, to tell what he had seen in Frisco town and to reminisce. From that first “discussion” they decided to “commission” me as the writer for a small book of reflections by the group to be attached alongside a number of sketches I had done previously based on their experiences in the old neighborhood and in the world related to those times. So I interviewed the crew, wrote or rather compiled the notes used in the sketches below but believe this task was mostly of my doing the physical writing and getting the hell out of the way. This slender book is dedicated to the memory of the guy who got them all on the road west-Peter Paul Markin whom I don’t have to mention more about here for he, his still present “ghost” will be amply discussed below. Zack James]              

In the tribute book the reflections of the North Adamsville corner boys come first and my sketches related to the subjects they mentioned were attached after them. In this on-line series I have reversed the order and am putting my sketches, singly, first and the good stuff, their stuff, last.     

When Prince Love Loved In The 1967 Summer Of Love

“Jesus, I never thought I would get here and here I am in San Francisco all in one piece standing at the foot of Russian Hill where all the “hippies” were hanging out before they went over to Golden Gate Park and “blew” their minds,” Joshua Breslin (a.k.a. Prince Love or Prince, and hereafter so identified), late of Olde (very old to hear him tell it) Saco (Maine) High School Class of 1967, but just now of youth nation, youth nation descending on friendly, friend-sized, go West young man (and woman), go West, heaven said to his boon companion of three days, Benny Buzz (real name Lawrence Stein, Brooklyn High School of Science, Class of 1967), also currently of youth nation. It was Benny Buzz who, having the vast experience of having been in ‘Frisco for a week now, and having “been up the hill,” who guided Prince Love to the foot of Russian Hill in preparation for, well, for his first summer of love experience. No, not the eternal teen summer of love at some beach, camp or vacationland amusement park where boys ogle girls (and they back, maybe) but the long expected jail break-out from the squares, from the cradle to grave plan-every-step world, and from the hassles, man, just the hassles.

Yes, Prince Love, could write the book on hassles, hassles followed by man, or not. Just a few week before he, having just graduated from Olde Saco High, had a “job offer,” a job working as a janitor in Shepard’s Textile Mill, ya, the ones who make those “boss” sweaters the girls are all crazy for these days. Crazy for in winter anyway because right now warm suns, California, Denver, hell even Maine suns, require nothing more than some skimpy top, shoulders showing, and a pair of shorts, short shorts depending on the legs or vanity. His father, Prescott, a long time employee of the mills, the lifeblood of Olde Saco just then, “pulled a few wires” to get him the job for the summer before he went off to State U in the fall. Last year, last year when he was nothing but a raw hang-out in front of the Colonial Doughnut Shoppe on Main Street (officially U.S. Route 1) with his boys (and occasionally girls, but only for a few moments while they picked up their orders) he would have jumped with both feet, maybe with both hands and feet, at the job to get some money for college.

But that was then and this is now, as they say. Now, or rather the now just a few weeks or so before he got to the foot of Russian Hill, he had received word through that mysterious youth nation grapevine that parents, squares, cops, and authority guys were frantic to figure out, but who, in the end, were clueless about, of a “great awakening” that was going on in ‘Frisco and that news fed, fed deep, into the wells of the discontent he was feeling, about his own desire to break-out from the squares, from the cradle to grave plan-every-step world, and from the hassles, man, just the hassles mentioned before. The grapevine, by the way, was not all that mysterious. Some young, long-haired, wild-looking guy dressed in a blotted multi-colored shirt (later he found out such things were called tie-dyed) from the West Coast had come east to see his grandparents who lived on Olde Saco Beach a few miles down the road and had run into Prince Love at the doughnut shop when he was looking for some joe and cakes to tide him over before a walk on the beach and told him about what was happening on the West Coast. Simple as that, okay.

That information, those pressing on the brain existential jail-break things, and well, he had just broken up with his girl, his long-time high school honey, Julie Cobb, were what drove him to seek the road west. Simple as that. Well not so simple, really, because, if the truth be known, Julie left him for another guy, an older guy who was already working in the mills (not Shepard’s but Cullen’s, the high society linen-makers), had some dough, had a boss 1964 Mustang and, most importantly, wanted to get married, and pretty soon too. That was the sticking point between the Prince and Julia, the marriage game thing that had been going on in the town since, since, well Prince didn’t know but it was pretty common. Graduate Olde Saco, work in the mills, get a couple of bucks, get married, get a tiny house on Atlantic Avenue, maybe, have two point six children, throw in a dog or two cats, and then finish up whitewashing that picket fence in front of the house with the grandchildren. No sale, not for Prince Love. He was going to college, leave the dust of that old town behind, and make a name for himself at something before he settled down in not-Olde Saco, maybe, maybe on the settle down. And from what he heard on his way west, and since he had arrived in San Fran a lot of people were feeling, wondering, groping for some answers just like him. And, ya, looking to try some dope, listen to some far-out music, grab some cool chick to shack up with, and really leave that hometown dust behind before going back east for the fall semester of school.

Now you are filled in, a little, on the what and the why of Prince (and Benny Buzz who however is right then leaving Prince to go see a man, well, go see a man about something, let’s just leave it at that) being on Russian Hill, that classic San Francisco hill mentioned a while back. A hill not previously known to first time ‘Frisco Prince Love, although maybe to some ancient Native American shaman delighted to see our homeland, the sea, out in the bay working it way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away.

I just remembered, you know everything, everything except how Prince Love got here which is not a big deal since he took some dough he had originally saved up for college and used it for the Greyhound bus fare to get him here. Not for him the hitchhike road through every back road. Not for him merry prankster buses driven by mad-monk zen masters in the heated western night.

Why? Well, come on now, not everybody got every piece of news, especially in Podunk Maine, about the ways west, VW bus west, stick-out-the-thumb west and that there were people, your kind of people, ready to pick you up and take you down the road a piece. Even backing up on super-highway interstates to pick up a fellow youth nation straggler left on some desolate stretch fair game for hungry police eyes. Besides, after about a two-day bout with his parents about not taking that summer job, using the dough for college for such foolishness (to quote his everywoman mother), and other assorted arguments, family arguments started back in childhood, he had promised them to take the bus west. Let’s just say hassles, man, hassles and be done with it. And now we are done with past.

Right then though, after saying a few things in parting to Benny Buzz about catching up with each other later, as he started walking up the hill toward the entrance to the mini-“people’s park” that was about half way up Russian Hill Prince spied a tall young man, maybe a few years older than him although such things were always hard to tell with older looking beards, drug haggards, and glazed looks. He was, at second glance, tall but not as tall as Prince, lanky, maybe not as lanky as him either and from the look of him his drug stews diet had taken some additional pounds off, and some desire for pounds as well, not really normally lanky. Dressed, always worthy of description in 1967 “Frisco, male or female, in full “hippie” regalia (faded olive drab World War II army jacket, half-faded blue jeans, bright red bandanna headband to keep his head from exploding, striped checkerboard flannel shirt against the cold bay winds, against the cold bay winds even in summer, and nighttime colds too, and now that we are on the West Coast, with roman sandals on his feet). And to draw the eye more fully to the scene he is sitting with two foxy-looking young women. One, the younger one, maybe a high school student, blonde, blue-eyed, slender, short shorts belying West Coast origin, and de rigueur practical road-worthy peasant blouse. A poster child for San Francisco summer of love if he ever saw one, and of his own feverish Maine night teenage desire summer or winter of love now that Julia was past. The other women, whom he found out later called herself Lupe Matin just then although the Prince found out that she had run through several monikers previously, a college student for sure , dark-haired, dark-eyed, slightly voluptuous, seemingly a little out of place, out of figuring place, with her current male companion completed the entourage. (Her real name, Susan Sharp, Vassar College, Class of 1966, and “trying to find herself.”)

Prince cast several glances at that regal company, nodded slightly, a knowing nod, eyes fixed, as was the fashion just then, and then turned around and asked to no one in particular but kind of zeroing in on the blonde (ya, he had a thing for blondes, see Julia was just that same kind of waspy blonde, minus the tan and year-round sunshine, that he fell for, fell for hard and fast), “Got some dope, for a hungry brother?” The male, who Prince would later come to know as Far-Out Phil (Phillip Larkin, North Adamsville, Massachusetts, Class of 1964), looked at him in a bemused manner (nice touch, right). Except for shorter hair, which only meant that this traveler had either not been on the road very long or had just recently caught the “finding himself” bug he could have, thought Far-Out to himself, been Phil’s brother, biological brother.

That line, that single Prince Love line, could have been echoed a thousand, maybe ten thousand times that day along a thousand hills (well maybe not that many in San Fran), aimed at any small clot of like-minded spirits. And Phil sensing that just that one sentence spoke of kindred said, “Sure, a little Columbia Red for the head, okay?” And so started the long, well hippie long, 1960s long anyway, relationship between one Phillip Larkin and one Joshua Breslin. And, maybe, including the women too.

And, of course, as well was that sense that Far-Out had that he and Prince Love were kindred was based on the way that the Prince posed that first question. His accent spoke, spoke hard of New England, not Boston but farther north. And once the pipe had been passed a couple of times and the heat of day started getting everybody a little talkative then Prince spilled out his story. Yes, he was from Olde Saco, Maine, born and bred, a working-class kid whose family had worked the town mills for a couple of generations, maybe more, but times were getting hard, real hard in those northern mill towns now that the mill-owners had got the big idea to head south and get some cheaper labor, real cheap. So Joshua, after he graduated from high school a few weeks before decided, on a whim (not really a whim though), to head west and check out prospects here on the coast for later use after college. Josh, now fully into his Prince Love self finished up his story by saying, “And here I am a few weeks later sitting on Russian Hill smoking righteous dope and sitting with some sweet ladies.”

The Prince was just being a little off-handedly flirtatious as was his style when around women, young or old (old being thirty, tops), aiming his ammunition in general but definitely honing in on the blonde, the blonde now identified for all eternity as Butterfly Swirl (real name, Kathleen Clarke, Carlsbad High School, California, Class of 1968). (Phil, by the way, never ever said what his reaction to that last part of the Prince’s spiel, the flirtatious part, which seemed, the way it was spoken, spoken by Phil in the re-telling, filled with menace. Girl-taking menace. Well, old North Adamsville corner boy Phil would have felt that way but maybe in that hazed-out summer of love it just passed by like so much air.) Naturally Phil, a lordly road warrior now, "on the bus" now, whatever his possible misgivings, invited the Prince to stay with them, seeing as they were practically neighbors back home. Prince Love was “family” now, and Butterfly seemed gladder than the others of that fact.

And of course, family, meant home, and home for Far-Out, Butterfly Swirl, and Lupe Matin meant the now locally famous (West Coast local, okay) yellow brick road bus now known as Captain Crunch’s Crash Pad (after the owner of the bus, and “leader,” whatever that meant, of the expedition). Prince Love, from the first night, not only felt that he had found a home, a home that he never felt he had in Olde Saco but that whatever happened out here he would survive. And as more dope-filled pipes were passed that night, and as the music played louder into the sea-mist bay night, and lights gleamed from all directions the Prince grew stronger in that conviction. Especially when Far Out Phil, acting out of some old testament patriarchal script, came sauntering over to the Prince around midnight and whispered in his ear, “Butterfly Swirl wants to be with you, okay?” And that night the Prince and Butterfly Swirl were “married.”

Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits An Encore -Looking For The Heart Of Saturday

Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits An Encore -Looking For The Heart Of Saturday 

From the pen of the late Peter Paul Markin who fell by the wayside, fell to his notoriously monstrous “wanting habits” accumulated since childhood looking too hard, looking to hard in the wrong places down among the weeds in Mexico, looking for train smoke and dreams if you really thought about the matter, looking for his own heart of Saturday night-RIP, Brother,RIP.     

****** 


If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of today’s bourgeois-driven push, bourgeois a better term than capitalist or imperialist if you are in America since it gives a better view of the unhindered social norms, the ethos rather than the sheer grab for filthy lucre; you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab every cheap-jack convenience like it was God’s own gold, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address, the address of Mister Tom Waits if you missed the headline or missed who is writing this thing. (Or better "wrote" since this piece is being edited posthumously by Zack James who found this and three companion pieces in the attic of Josh Breslin's Olde Saco family house in Olde Saco, Maine when they were looking to dispose of whatever could be disposed of in preparation for selling the place so Josh and Lana could move into smaller quarters and Josh told him the long and at the end the sad story about Josh's and Markin's meeting out in San Francisco in the summer of love 1960s times and about Markin's awful fate down in Mexico. That story drove Zack to the editing job in order that a genuine mad monk writer could some forty years after his death receive a small recognition of his ambitious talent.) 


Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing once I describe what was involved maybe it didn’t just start of late. Maybe the whole ill-starred rising went back to the time when this continent was, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald said way back in the 1920s when he made up the Jazz Age and reeled back in dismay once he saw how those coupon-clippers devoured all good sense and sober ethos, just a fresh green breast of land eyed by some hungry sailors, some hungry Dutch sailors who took what they wanted back the homeland and made a grave attempt to fatten their own chests. Just check out any Dutch master painting to see what I mean.


Going back to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys and their city on the hill but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook these world-wise and world weary boys were no longer worrying about novenas and indulgences against some netherworld to the wheel of the capitalist profit. Profit (grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap) for "you at the expense of me" system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. The eternal story of the short end of the stick if you aren’t ready for sociological treatises and rely on guys like Tom Waits to wordsmith the lyrics to set you right about what is wrong. But you get the point.


If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world, grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap,  with blinkers on before you got stuck in the human sink that you have still not been able to get out of) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few times but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering,  have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself  into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half-forgotten, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups complete with spoons to measure that coffee out as the very modernist poet once said making his modern statement about the world created since the turn of the 19th century that while away your life). Need to reach back to roots, reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America, the vanilla red scare Cold War night that kicked the ass out of all the old to make us crave sameness, head down, run for cover, in order to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget those simple country blues, old country flames, Appalachia mountain breeze coming through the hills and hollows songs, lonely midnight by the fire cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex big ass brass sympatico squeezes Spanish is the loving tongue, Irish desperate struggles against John Bull  sorrows and cautionary tale Child ballads, plucked out early by a professor over on Brattle Street back when the Brahmins very publicly ruled the roost, or Cajun Saturday night stewed drunks that made the people feel good times, reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter [oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay-Zack James] and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.


If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something scary coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs, brother even I Iearned early that it was a dangerous world, yeah, learned very early in the Adamsville projects where you got a very real taste of danger before you got too much older than five or six), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark-skinned like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table, speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab or I-talian, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang and that fresh green breast of land  and that city on a hill that drove them cross-eyed and inflamed or ask Max Weber, he footnoted the whole thing, put paid to any idea of otherworldly virtue), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half-forgotten remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.


If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side of the fence. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, like that time Jack from Carver wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that sagging bed to perdition and worse losing that thing she had for sex once she started selling it by the hour. Hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire watch out.


So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, those who had gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity, those who just didn’t get it frankly in this fast old world taken in by some grifter’s bluster), those who never had anything but lost next to their names, those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling sweet dream snow in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the layered canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames and the sight of two modern warriors shirtless, sweaty, in a trance, high as kites, dancing by themselves like whirling dervishes   ready to do justice for the white man's greed until the flames flickered out and they fell in a heap exhausted) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving, fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japan seas), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses, hell, call them flop houses, afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.


If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore–mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific  trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just let that one pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, big book academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world (the big mass of world sweated field braceros, sharecroppers, landless peasants and now cold-water flat urban dwellers fresh from the played out land, or taken land) then Tom Waits is your stop.


Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record [CD or download okay-Zack] and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living.


See he ain’t looking for all haloed saints out there, some Saint Jerome spreading the word out to the desert tribes, out on the American mean streets he has pawed around the edges, maybe doesn’t believe in saints for all I know, but is out looking for busted black-hearted angels all dressed in some slinky silk thing to make a man, a high-shelf whiskey man having hustled some dough better left unexplained that night going off his moorings feeding her drinks and she a liquor sponge (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill when she split, after she split her take with the bartender who watered her drinks, hell, the thing was sweet all she needed to do when he leaned into her was grab his sorry ass and get the damn wallet). Looking too, a child of the pin-up playboy 1950s, for girls with Monroe hips (hips swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and enflaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys for promising the world for one forbidden night), got real, and got left for dead with cigar wrapping rings. Yeah, looking for the desperate out there who went off the righteous path and wound up too young face down in some forsaken woods who said she needed to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten. 



Tom Waits once you get the habit gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Okie/Arkie Dove Linkhorns and Frankie Machines of the world who had to keep moving just for the sake of moving something in the DNA driving that whirlwind, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, pig-stealing, deer-pouching, working the commons without a license, highwaymen, ancient jack-rollers, the flotsam and jetsam of the old world, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, the wretched of the earth and their kin, the ones who the old blessed Paris communards were thinking of when they hanged a sign saying “Death to Thieves” from the Hotel de Ville balcony, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If you want to hear about those desperate brethren then here is your stop as well.


If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear to the scratchy earth and some occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Hey, let’s leave it at this- if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.