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Chelsea Manning tells off Harvard & the CIA

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FYI, sent by Al Sargis, VFP... 

03 October 2017

Chelsea Manning. (photo: Heidi Gutman/ABC/Getty Images)

Chelsea Manning Tells Off Harvard and the CIA

By Spencer Ackerman 

 

helsea Manning never ended up lecturing at Harvard University after loud objections from the Central Intelligence Agency. But late Monday afternoon, the day she was supposed to begin her fellowship, Manning did talk about surveillance, tech, and social repression down the street—at the similarly prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For someone who enlisted in the Army at a young age and spent most of her adult life in a military prison, seeing the prevalence of domestic surveillance and the militarization of policing is “like I’m walking out into the most boring dystopian novel I can imagine,” she told The Daily Beast shortly after her talk. “It feels like American cities, certain parts of them, are occupied by an American force, the police department.”

Having traveled across the East and West Coasts since her release, one of the 21st century’s signature whistleblowers is trying to reconnect with her country and spread an activist message about political engagement. She ran up against an obstacle last month: the current and former intelligence officials who pressed Harvard to reject her fellowship.

Yet the result was an MIT conversation with the ACLU’s Kade Crockford that encouraged the software engineers of tomorrow to think through the applications of their innovations that might aid a more expansive surveillance apparatus—itself a statement of defiance to those who’d rather respectable institutions shun her.

“What’s important here is that the Central Intelligence Agency and associated people in the intelligence community, they think they can stifle dissent, all forms of dissent, all across America and use academic institutions as a battleground,” Manning said.

Last month, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government withdrew a fellowship offer it had extended to Manning. Michael Morell, the former acting CIA director, set off a backlash by resigning his own Harvard fellowship over outrage that “leaks by Ms. Manning put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk.” Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director, followed up by calling Manning an “American traitor.” (Never mind the fact that Pompeo promoted WikiLeaks, the outlet that published Manning’s leaks, during the 2016 campaign.)

Manning said she couldn’t be bothered by the spymasters’ words. “I’m not going to be afraid and I’m not going to be intimidated,” she added.

Her MIT talk, delivered to about 130 students and other attendees, was the result of a post-Harvard invitation extended by Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab after Manning reached out through a mutual friend, MIT confirmed. In it, Manning said, she touched on living in the panopticon of prison as a “microcosm” for tech-fueled advancements in repression, “when it comes to facial recognition, surveillance, using databases and techniques to monitor and surveil people,” as well as how she depended on other inmates for support while imprisoned.

Then she issued a warning to the engineers MIT will matriculate: “While we might be making a piece of software that does one thing, for medicine or marketing or advertising, it can be used in a military context or to suppress dissent. These technological solutions are kind of universal in that sense that they can be misused.”

‘Aiding the Enemy?’

The MIT talk was the latest skirmish in a battle over Manning’s legacy—one that shows no sign of stopping.

“One of the things we wanted to make sure was that it was about the substance of the conversation, we didn’t want this to be just about snubbing Harvard,” Ito explained in introducing one of the first public talks given by a figure who has been defined for seven years mostly by hostile, powerful officials.

Contrary to Pompeo’s invective, a military judge in 2013 specifically acquitted Manning, then known as Bradley, of knowingly “aiding the enemy.” She was convicted of multiple counts of leaking classified information and received a 35-year sentence. After serving seven years, to include pre-trial detention, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in January. She walked free from Fort Leavenworth in May after confinement so severe—it included a yearlong stint in solitary—that a U.N. special rapporteur on torture called it a violation of her “right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of [her] presumption of innocence.”

Manning’s deployment to Iraq and exposure to the material she leaked disillusioned her to the U.S. war effort. She said at her sentencing: “It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.”

Pompeo and Morell made points frequently invoked by Manning’s detractors, and not often carefully. In the wake of her disclosures’ publication by WikiLeaks in 2010, the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff charged that the group “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

Yet an actual taxonomy of any harm resulting from Manning’s leaks, something that might allow for a balanced assessment of what she did and the punishment she subsequently endured, is not a matter of public knowledge seven years after Manning’s saga began. Detractors in the intelligence agencies say doing so would put more sources and methods at risk, compounding the damage; Manning supporters consider that too convenient, permitting overblown accusations against her to remain in perpetual circulation.

Manning’s defense counsel in her military trial was not permitted to read a classified document assessing the impact of her leaks of thousands of tactical military reports and diplomatic cables.

But BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold obtained the document earlier this year after transparency litigation and wrote that the multi-agency task force found her leaks “largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to U.S. interests.” The 2011-era document found the leaks had potential to “serious[ly] damage… intelligence sources, informants, and the Afghan population” and would have their greatest likely effect on “cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors.”

Academics and human-rights groups have said that contacts with the U.S., revealed in the diplomatic cables, complicated their jobs and potentially placed them in danger in authoritarian countries. But there remains little certainty over whether those leaks actually led to someone suffering harm.

Evidence the leaks contained about greater civilian deaths and injuries than the Pentagon had disclosed, something Manning’s defenders cite to demonstrate her leaks’ importance, could damage “support for current operations in the region,” the task force found, focusing more on the leaks than on the deaths they revealed.

That matched contemporaneous reporting, which found the Obama administration’s claims about the damage Manning caused exaggerated. A congressional official briefed on the leaks’ impact in 2011 told Reuters they were “embarrassing but not damaging.”

‘An Historic Embarrassment for American Academia’

In a confusing statement following the CIA pressure, Harvard’s Douglas Elmendorf called extending the fellowship to Manning “a mistake.” Elmendorf said the initial invitation to her was defensible but neglected the impact of the “perceived honor that it implies to some people,” which opened up Harvard to criticism for hypocrisy in honoring, among others, Sean Spicer, who repeatedly lied from the White House podium as President Trump’s press secretary. As a consolation, Elmendorf offered Manning a one-day opportunity to “spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak in the Forum.” That isn’t going to happen.

The filmmaker Eugene Jarecki told The Daily Beast that Harvard’s decision was “an historic embarrassment for American academia.”

Jarecki interviewed Manning at a public event on Nantucket shortly after Harvard’s about-face and pronounced himself impressed with her willingness to engage with hard questions.

“She’s a remarkable human being who really is a walking concentration of several-hot button issues in American life,” Jarecki said. “It was both a surprise and no surprise, in a way, to see an institution such as Harvard quake in their boots when Chelsea’s name is mentioned.”

Despite the CIA pressure and Harvard’s acquiescence to it, Manning indicated to The Daily Beast that political activism will be a feature of her unfolding life as a free woman.

In prison, she learned “we are our own political agents,” depending on one another—a message that seems to inform where she’s going next.

“I’m trying to live my life, but I realize I can’t go back to the life I was living before. I need to be with the people I care about, and we need to be with each other. It’s not about me—I’m very concerned about the direction all of us are going in,” she said.

“I think it’s important people understand they have power. Nobody can give them power and give them rights, we need to assert that.”

Out in the tech world, Manning said she got the sense engineers are “expecting someone to tell them what to do” with their innovations, rather than figuring out their social utility through dialogue with their neighbors.

“The reality is people need to... have these conversations in our communities right now. We can’t wait for someone to come up with a final product, idea, [or] solution,” she said. “There’s no roadmap to the future. We have to chart our own course.”

___________________________________________________

Spencer Ackerman is a senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast. The former U.S. national security editor for the Guardian, Ackerman was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team reporting on Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Be-Bop The Adventure Car Hop –With Johnny Ace’s Classic Pledging My Love In Mind.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The  Be-Bop The Adventure Car Hop –With Johnny Ace’s Classic Pledging My Love In Mind.

By Allan Jackson

[One on the sub-texts, nice word right, of this series was to remember certain institutions, certain customs, certain mores, especially in growing up poor towns like the one I and some of the writers in this space grew up with not as nostalgia pieces although that was part of the mix but to see how all of that fit into day to day life among the  corner boys. And to see how much the dead weight of those institutions, customs, mores acted as a drag when we decided to say the hell with all that. Sort of like telling kids today that not long ago  we would use a bulky typewriter to communicate writing and not this beautiful word processor which makes life so much easier these days.     

Not all those institutions, customs, mores, were world historic or anything like that. Some stuff like the car hop at the outdoor drive-in restaurant make famous by the movie American Graffiti later, the Saturday afternoon double feature matinee, the drive-in theater scam, the juke-box jive scam and the like were just ways for poor boys to get by. Take the car hop thing, the job, the way a lot of young women, some in high school or college so slumming but others who were on a career path (as long as it lasted) as well who gave guys, high testosterone guys, heart attacks every time they passed by. That job except maybe out in Omaha, or Grand Island where they have not gotten the word yet is gone and so a certain version of the male fantasy. Gone too it seems talking to young people, young guys especially is the dream car, dream of car mostly in our crowd which was your cache into that world. Those not in that world, the walker, didn’t mean jack in those days. Allan Jackson]      

No question if you were alive in the 1950s in America, and maybe in other countries too for all I know but I think that this is truly an American phenomenon, alive meaning of course if you were young, say between twelve and twenty- five no older because then you hovered too close to being parents and hence, well hence, square in the golden age of the automobile met the golden age of al fresco dining, okay, okay low-end pre-Big Mac dining. Sorry, I got carried away. Golden Age eating outdoors, well, not really outdoors but in your Golden Age automobile at the local drive-in restaurant (not drive through like today but that may have been true too).

See the idea was that a young guy, maybe a guy who was a wiz at fixing up cars and who had retro-fitted, dual carb-fitted, low-slung wheels-fitted, amp-fitted, radio jacked-up some broken down wreak that some dealer had taken as a trade-in and was ready to ship to the junkyard and made it a “boss” car, like a ‘57 Chevy or Dodge or some nerdy young guy who had two left hands and had borrowed his father’s blah-blah family car for the night would bring his date to the drive-in restaurant and did not give a damn about the cuisine or the ambience against sitting in that car all private and all to munch on burgers and fries. And be seen in that “boss” car or in the case of the father-borrowed car just to be seen with his date. Be seen by the million and one young guys, maybe guys who were also wizzes at fixing up cars and who had also retro-fitted, dual carb-fitted, low-slung wheels-fitted, amp-fitted radio jacked-up some broken down wreak and made it a “boss” car, like a ‘57 Chevy or ‘56 Dodge or some nerdy young guys who had two left hands and had borrowed their father’s blah-blah family car for the night would bring their dates to the drive-in restaurant and did not give a damn about the cuisine or the ambience against sitting in those cars all private and all to munch on burgers and fries. Also to be seen and to be placed in the high school pecking order accordingly. Or if not in high school (but also not over twenty-five remember) to be paid homage for surviving that chore, and for knowing the ropes, knowing the signposts in the drive-in restaurant night.     

My old friend Jack Lowell had succinctly put the idea of golden age automobile and golden age dining out together one night, really early one morning, when he, we,  were feeling a little melancholy for the old days, and when he had had too much whiskey. All that needed to be added to the golden mix was to say that Eddie, Eddie Connell, would have been out, out once again some night, some weekend night more than likely with his ever-lovin’ Ginny, Virginia Stone, in the Clintondale 1950s be-bop night, having a little something to eat at the Adventure Car Hop, that burgers and fries eternal youth night out dining combo (did I mention a Coke or Pepsi, if I did not then those were the standard drinks to wash those hard-hearted burgers and those fat-saturated fries down) after a hard night of dancing to the local rockers down in Hullsville and afterward a bout down at Adamsville Beach located a couple of towns over and so filled with Clintondale and other young couples seeking some privacy from watchful town eyes, in the “submarine race” watching night.

Jack had good reason to want to talk about his best friend back then Eddie, about his “boss” ’57 two-toned, white and green, Chevy, and especially about his girl, his Ginny, since in the love wars Ginny had thrown him over for Eddie, had chosen Eddie’s souped-up car over Jack’s walking feet when the deal went down. Yeah, Eddie and Jack had back then still remained friends, had still been simpatico despite the girl mess-up. See just before the Ginny swap Jack had taken Ellen Riley, formerly the head cheer-leader at Clintondale High back in 1955 away from Eddie, the year they all, Jack, Eddie, Ginny, and Ellen if you are keeping count, had graduated from high school although neither Eddie or Jack knew Ginny or Ellen there. So all was fair in love and war.  Although Jack had thought it was just slightly unfair that Ellen had subsequently thrown him over, Jack the struggling college student with no dough and no car just like he had been in high school, for a guy from Hullsville because she did not want to wait to get married until after he graduated and she empathically was tired unto death of walking. Or worse, riding that clunky old Eastern Transit bus which was always late and did not run after midnight just in case they had something going down at the beach or after the Hullsville dance got out when her father’s hand-me-down car had gone to the graveyard and they had no car between them.      

But maybe Jack had better fill a candid world in on a couple of things to back up why he wanted to talk about Eddie and Ginny that whiskey-filled night. Was feeling just a little pang after all those years for having let Ginny go so easily. Jack and Eddie had known each other since the old days at Clintondale North Elementary and had been through thick and thin together (that “thin” usually revolved around girls, starting with Rosalind in the fifth grade who had eventually thrown them both over for a kid, Ricky Kelly, Jesus, wimpy Ricky Kelly, in the sixth grade). In high school they had drifted apart for a while when Eddie decided that since he was no student that he would take up automotive mechanics and Jack with two left hands pursued the college course.

Drifted apart until come sixteen Eddie, who proved to be a an ace mechanic, a natural, had fixed up some old Hudson that he found in the junkyard and made it a “boss” (Jack adamantly refused to define that term “boss” for that candid world since some things are, or should be, self-evident). That vehicle had been a “fox” lure (girls, okay) all through high school for both young men, except those times when Eddie wanted to take his girl of the week to Adamsville Beach and wanted to use the back seat alone with said honey.  And then go to the Adventure Car Hop for a little something to eat before taking her home.

That all worked well enough in high school since neither young man had any serious relationships. Then after high school the workaday world hit Eddie and he took a job at Duggan Brothers Garage and Jack went off to the local college, Gloversville State, on a scholarship while continuing to live at home. One night when Jack was a sophomore at Gloversville he and Eddie, Eddie with the new ’57 “boss” Chevy then, went to a rock and roll dance down in Hullsville arranged for those still under twenty-one and who could not legally drink (of course there was more booze than you could shake a stick at out in the parking lot which faced Hullsville Beach but that is a another story) and that is where Jack met Ginny, a former classmate whom he had not known in school because, well, because as she told him that night she did not then have anything to do with “corner boys,” so had met her, had talked to her, had danced with her and afterward they and Eddie and a girl he picked up at the dance, not Ellen, had gone to the Adventure Car Hop for the first time together to grab a bite to eat before going home. Strangely Ginny, although she grew up in Clintondale, had never been there before considering it nothing but a male “hang-out” scene (which at some level Jack admitted to her was true).

And so started the love affair between Jack and Ginny, although according to Jack the thing had many rocky moments from the start on the question of Jack, poor boy Jack, not having his own car, having to either double-date with Eddie, whom she did not like then, or worse, walk when Eddie had his back seat wanting habits on. And her carping at Jack for not wanting to quit college to get married and start a family right away (Ginny had not gone on to school after high school and went to work in Boston for John Hancock Insurance where she was moving up in the organization). And that went on for a while.

Meanwhile Eddie had taken up with Ellen, whom he had not known in high school either, nor had Jack, because as she told Eddie “she was into football players with a future, not grease monkeys.” She saw the error of her ways when she had brought her car in for repairs and Eddie worked on the car, and on her. She was going to Adamsville Junior College right down the road but she saw something in Eddie, for a while. Then, although they all had double-dated together she “hit” on Jack one night, wound up going to bed with him a few weeks later down in Cape Cod, where she shared a cottage with six other college classmates for the summer, when Eddie had to go out of town for a couple of weeks to a GM training school and that was that.                      

Of course once the news got around, and in small city Clintondale that did not take long, especially with those summer roommates of hers, of Jack and Ellen to reach Ginny, and Eddie all bets were off. Ginny brushed Jack off with a solo telephone call to him in which she terminated their affair after about three sentences with a “I don’t want to discuss it further, I want to end this conversation,” yeah, the big brush-off. Ellen told Eddie that they were done and while he feigned being hurt about it the truth was that he had not been all that happy with her of late, thought she was drifting away from him when she decided against his protests to go in on that summer cottage. And so they parted, although Eddie was a little sore at Jack for a while, as usual when they mixed it up with their women.

One afternoon Eddie saw Ginny waiting for the bus, that damn Eastern Transport bus, and took her on the “rebound” (although don’t expect him to use that word about or around Ginny, just don’t). Ginny, for her part, decided that Eddie wasn’t so bad after all, and he did have that “boss” car and when they talked about it one night after they had hit the silk sheets was not adverse to the idea of marriage. And so their thing went in the Clintondale night for a while. Let’s hone in on what Eddie and Ginny were up to that long ago night Jack talked about when he got the blues about the old days, okay.  

“Two hamburgers, all the trimmings, two fries, two Cokes, Sissy,” rasped half-whispering Eddie Connell to Adventure Car Hop number one primo car hop Sissy Jordan. Eddie and Sissy had known each other forever. Sissy had been Eddie’s girlfriend back in junior high days, back in eight-grade at Clintondale North Junior High when he learned a thing or two about girls, about girl charms and girl bewilderments. And Sissy had been his instructor, although like all such early bracings with the opposite sex there was as much misinformation and confusion as intimacy since nobody, no parent, no teacher, and no preacher was cluing any kids in, except some lame talk about the birds and the bees, kids’ stuff. Things, as happens all the time in teen love, had not worked out between them. Had not worked out as well because by ninth grade blossoming Sissy was to be found sitting in the front seat of senior football halfback Jimmy Jordan’s two-toned souped-up Hudson and Sissy had no time for mere boys then. Such is life.   

For those who know not of Adventure Car Hop places or car hops here is a quick primer. These drive-in restaurants in the 1950s were of a piece, all glitter in the night (they lost a lot of allure seen passing by in the day and could have been any diner USA at those hours), all neon lights aglow that could be seen from a mile away as you headed out Route 3 from Clintondale Center, a small shopping area eventually replaced as the place to shop by the Gloversville Mall. The neon lights spelling out Adventure Car Hop super-imposed on an outline of a comely car hop also in neon meant, well, meant adventure, mystery, oh hell, sex. So any given Friday or Saturday night and in summer almost any night you would see the place packed with all kinds of youth cars in each striped slot. In summer the walkers, and almost every kid, girl or boy, had done the walk there before their coming of car age could sit and eat their meals on the wooden picnic tables the management provided. In winter they could go inside and sit at the vinyl-cushioned booths and order their meals while listening to the latest hits on the jukebox. Or if single, and that was rare, there were swiveling red vinyl-topped stools to sit at. Sit at and view Mel, Lenny, or Benny (the owner) pulling short order cook duty behind a metallic counter and view as well, get an eyeful if you thought about it, of the really comely car hops doing their frenetic best to keep up with the orders (and since space was at a premium avoid bumping into each other with big orders of drinks on their trays). Really thought if you went from Bangor to La Jolla you would see the same basic set-up so you would never have to worry about a place to go at night at least anywhere in America where ill-disposed parents would not be found in those precincts. 

The Adventure Car Hop, the only such place in town and therefore a magnet for everybody from about twelve to twenty-something was (now long gone and the site of a small office park)  nothing but an old time drive-in restaurant where the car hop personally took your order from you while you were  sitting in your “boss” car. Hopefully boss car, although the lot the night Jack thought about how Eddie and Ginny graced the place had been filled with dads’ borrowed cars, strictly not boss, not boss at all.  Sitting with your “boss” girl (you had better have called her that or the next week she would be somebody else’s “boss” honey). And the place became a rite of passage for Jack’s youngest brother Sam several years later even though the family had moved to Adamsville by then.  That luscious car hop would return to you after, well, it depended on how busy it was, and just then around midnight this was Adventure Car Hop busy time, with your order on a tray which attached to your door. By the way families, parents alone without children, or anybody else over twenty-something either gave the place a wide berth or only went there during the day when no self-respecting young person, with or without a car or a date, would be seen dead there, certainly not to eat the food. Jesus no. 

Now Sissy, a little older then than most Clintondale car hops at almost twenty-two, had turned into nothing but a career waitress, a foxy one still, but a waitress which was all a car hop really was. Except most car hops at Adventure Car Hop were "slumming” through senior-hood at Clintondale High or were freshman at some local college and were just trying to make some extra money for this and that while being beautiful. Because, and there was no scientific proof for this, but none was needed, at Adventure Car Hop in the year 1959 every car hop had been a fox (that beautiful just mentioned), a double fox on some nights, in their red short shorts, tight white blouses, and funny-shaped red and white box hats. And Sissy topped the list. Here though is where Sissy made a wrong turn, made her a career waitress (and made Eddie feel sorry for her, or at least sorry for losing her instruction back in ninth grade to some damn old football player). She had let Jimmy Jordan  have his way with her too many times, too many unprotected times (again in the ignorance 1950s, in Clintondale at least, the fine points of contraception, or even cautious use of rubbers was a book sealed with seven seals mostly), when she was a senior at Clintondale High back in 1955 (and Jimmy was up at State U playing football and also having off-hand quite ignorant sex with a few adoring college girlfriends on the side).

So that year she had had to drop out of school to have a baby (Jack said they called it “gone to Aunt Ella’s” and once a girl was not seen for a while someone would use that term and that was all that was needed to be said, except the occasional sighing about a good girl gone wrong or scorn from the prissy girls who allegedly were saving “it” for marriage). But see Jimmy, caddish Jimmy, left Sissy in the lurch, would not marry her or provide for the child (what the hell he was a student, he had no dough even if he had been willing to do the honorable thing, which he was not) and so she never went back to finish up after that visit to Aunt Ella. She had latched onto the job at Adventure Car Hop to support her child since Benny could have cared less about her maternal status as long as she showed those long legs, those firm breasts, those ruby-red lips and those dazzling blue eyes to great effect in those shorts and tight blouse that kept the boys coming in, even the boys with dates. Yeah, so he could care less for as long as she could keep eyes turned her way.

The story, an old story in town since there were a couple of “role models,” Jenny and Delores working at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on East Main who followed this career path after having children out of wedlock. And thus all the signs told that career waitress was to be Sissy’s fate, maybe not at that place but probably she would wind up at Jimmy Jack’s or some truck stop diner on the outside of town with a trying too hard too tight steam-sweated uniform, stubby pencil in her hair, a wad of gum in her mouth, still fending off, mostly fending off except when she got the urge or felt lonely for a man, lonesome trucker advances.          

But back to the 1959 be-bop night, the be-bop Friday or Saturday night when those car hops, those foxes, were magnets for every guy with a car, a boss one or a father’s car it did not matter but without girls filling the seats, especially the front seat, hoping against hope for a moment with one of those car hops. And for car guys with girls in those front seats looking to show off their girls, claiming they were foxier, while sneaking furtive glances toward the bustling car hops, even than the car hops, if that was possible, and it usually wasn’t. Although under no conditions let your date know that if you wanted a date next week and not the freeze-out “not home” treatment. More importantly, to show off their “boss cars.” And playing, playing loudly for all within one hundred yards to hear, their souped-up car radio complexes, turned nightly in rock heaven’s WJDA, the radio station choice of everyone under the age of thirty.

As Jack honed in on that remembrance night on Eddie's super-duplex speaker combo The Dell-Vikings were singing their hit, Black Slacks, and some walkers were crooning along to the tune. Yes, if you can believe this, some guys and girls, some lame guys and girls, not junior high kids who couldn’t drive anyway but over sixteen high school students actually walked to the Adventure Car Hop to grab something to eat after the Clintondale Majestic Theater let out. They, of course, ate at the thoughtfully provided picnic tables although their orders were still taken by Sissy’s leggy brigade. Nicely served by those tip-hungry car hops just like real customers with a glimmer of nighttime social standing, although they were still nothing but lamos in the real night social order.

But, getting back to Eddie and Ginny, see Sissy would have known something that you and I would not have known, could not have known, just by the way Eddie placed his order as The Falcon’s doo wop serenade, Your So Fine, blared away from his radio in the fading night. Sissy knew because, being a fox she had had plenty of experience knowing the drive-in restaurant protocol after the battles had subsided down at Adamsville or Hullsville Beach “submarine watching” night, including with Eddie in the days, the junior high days when she and Eddie were nothing but lamo car-less walkers. And what she knew was that Eddie and Ginny, who had been nothing but a “stick” when Eddie and she were an item, a stick being a girl, a twelve or thirteen year old junior high school girl with no “shape,” unlike Sissy who did have a shape, although no question, no question even to Sissy Ginny had a shape now, not as good as hers but a shape good enough to keep Eddie snagged, had been "doing it” down at Hullsville Beach. Doing “it” after spending the early part of the evening at the Surf, the local rock dance hall for those over twenty-one (and where liquor was served). The tip-off: Eddie’s request for all the trimmings on his hamburgers. All the trimmings in this case being mustard, ketchup, pickles, lettuce, and here is the clincher, onions. Yes, Eddie and Ginny are done with love’s chores for the evening and can now revert to primal culinary needs without rancor, or concern.

Sissy had to laugh at how ritualized, although she would never have used such a word herself, may have not been up on her sociological jargon, to describe what was going on in the youthful night life in Clintondale (including the really just slightly older set like the clients of the Surf rock club, Eddie and Ginny, who had learned the ropes at Adventure Car Hop way back when). If a couple came early, say eight o’clock, they never ordered onions, no way, the night still held too much promise. The walkers, well, the walkers you couldn’t tell, especially the young walkers like she and Eddie in the old days, but usually they didn’t have enough sense to say “no onions.” And then there were the Eddies and Ginnys floating in around two, or three, in the morning, “done” (and the reader knows what “done” is now), starving, maybe a little drunk and ready to devour Benny’s (who was doing short order duty that night since Mel had called in sick, “rum” sick Benny called it) cardboard hamburgers, deep-fried, fat-saturated French fries, and diluted soda (known locally as tonic, go figure) as long as those burgers had onions, many onions on them. And as we turn off this scene to the strains of Johnny Ace crooning Pledging My Love on Eddie’s car radio competing just now with a car further over with The Elegants’ Little Star Sissy had just place the tray on Eddie’s side of the car and had brought his order and placed it on the tray, with all the trimmings.

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

Happy, Happy Birthday Baby-On the 200^th Anniversary Of The “Birth” of Mary Shelley’s “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 human parts, and few jolts of electricity. Back in day 1818 when Mary Shelley (she of the thoroughbred breeding via Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and channeling Percy Shelley) wrote her iconic classis Frankenstein although I like the Modern Prometheus part better science was pretty primitive on that count but provided an impetus to further discovery. Unlike today through genetic engineering we have better understanding of science and medicine although at times we need to treat science like a thing from which we have to run. (Example, a very current example, nuclear weapons.)      

Still Mary Shelley was onto something, some very worthy thoughts about human beings, about beings, about where women fit into the whole scheme of things if we can at the flip of a button create life. Also puts a big crimp in the various ideas about God and his or her tasks. We know, or at least I know, that Frankenstein aka Modern Prometheus has gotten a bad rap especially since the rise of the cinema turned him from a misunderstood and challenged being into a monster. Mary Shelley started something for us to think about and now we have to try to put the genie back in the bottle.  

In Cambridge-anti-drones protest May 26

 anti-drones protest May 26

To  act-ma@act-ma.org  

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Join us to protest the US drone warfare program around the world Saturday,
May 26 at noon in Central Square, Cambridge. We will display a drone
replica, hold signs of drone victims in Pakistan and speak out against this
deadly new form of war, that terrorizes people in many countries.
Organized by the Eastern Massachusetts Anti-Drones Network, a task force of
UJP. For info, call (617) 776-6524 or write info@justicewithpeace.org.
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The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- “The Next Girl Who Throws Sand In My Face Is…” –With Johnny Silver’s Sad Be-Bop 1960s Beach Blanket Saga In Mind.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night- “The Next Girl Who Throws Sand In My Face Is…” –With Johnny Silver’s Sad Be-Bop 1960s Beach Blanket Saga In Mind.

A YouTube film clip of the Falcons performing You're So Fine.

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[I could not tell you thing one about the 1960s dating rituals on in the farmlands although I think from what Laura Perkins who actually grew up on hard rock truck farm in upstate New York it had a lot to do with going to school basketball games, checking out the Dairy Queen and maybe, just maybe, “necking” down in some back road Farmer Brown place. I could not tell you thing one about what the 1960s dating rituals were among the leafy suburban youth but from what ex-wife number one, Josie Davis, told me it had plenty to do with driving cars, driving to nice restaurants, checking out the woods around Walden Pond and the like and maybe, just maybe, “necking” down behind the boathouse at said pond. I could not tell you thing one about the 1960s dating rituals of the small town mountain teens  of Vermont or Colorado although I think what I have learned from Janis Jamison, Sam Lowell’s wife number two they mostly hiked and biked and drank large quantities of beer and maybe, just maybe, “necking” up on Sugar Mountain. As for the dating rituals of the 1960s Mayfair swell progeny I am clueless about that as I am about every aspect of their existences except they probably had plenty of discretionary funds to pave their ways and maybe, just maybe, “necking” if that was something they even knew about (although Josh Breslin’s second wife, Amy Drinkwater, yes of that Drinkwater tribe who owned all the factories in Ohio before they went under told Josh who told me that the sexual activity among the Mayfair swell young, replicating that of their parents was like that of rabbits.) 

What I do know about and provided the genesis of this story about beautiful Johnny Silver when he was a squirt and later when he was Handsome Johnny and Scribe spent half his time fending off girls who wanted to meet Johnny or know what he was up to meaning did he already have a girlfriend was the 1960s dating rituals of those who grew up near our mother the ocean. I knew exactly what “watching submarine races” meant, knew why cars parked along the boulevard were fogged to perdition come late Friday or Saturday night, knew who were nerds and had to fund shelter against the night behind the seawall and who got to square off with some honey down at the Squaw Rock end of the beach. Knew lots of little tricks about how to get girls to talk to you when we were hanging out even if all of this information never got translated into any dates, at least with hometown girls during high school. Knew too what Josh and a few of the other guys meant when they said “don’t bury me in Kansas.” Yeah strewn ashes on the sea is our fate and rightly so. Allan Jackson]

********** 

No question that Jimmy Callahan and his corner boy comrades, including Sam Lowell, of the old Frankie Riley-led Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out “up the Downs” (no further explanation is necessary for any old corner boy who knew pizza parlors were exceptionally good places to hang your knee against a wall waiting, well just waiting for whatever might come up for any others it was nearly impossible to be a corner boy if you did not have a corner and that should be enough on this matter) from the day high school got out for the summer in the early 1960s drew a bee-line straight to the old-time Adamsville Beach of blessed memory. One day recently Jimmy had been thinking back to those times, back a half century at least, as he walked along the beach at Big Sur and had been telling his girlfriend, Miranda, that his love affair with the sea started almost from the day he was born near that beach, a beach that still held his sway although he had seen, and was seeing right there with her better beaches since then. (As far as that girlfriend designation goes with Miranda Jimmy always wondered what the heck do you call somebody whom you are not married to but are intimate with who is along with you pushing the wrong side of sixty, so Jimmy’s simple girlfriend it is until somebody comes up with something better that “significant other,” what the hell does that mean, “consort,” like he/they were royalty or something or “partner,” like you were ready for incorporation rather than romance.)

The old Adamsville beach with its marshlands anchoring each end, its stone-laden sands uncomfortable to sit on, its rendezvous teen meet-up yacht clubs, its well-sat upon seawalls, and its thousand and one night stories of late night trysts in fugitive automobiles and while on skimpy beach blankets, its smoldering fried clams at the Clam Shack fit for a king or queen, its Howard Johnson’s many-flavored ice creams still held memories wherever he was in later life.

Although from what Red Rowley, an old corner boy comrade, had told Jimmy a while back when they had touched base for a minute in Sweeney’s Funeral Parlor over in landlocked Clintondale a couple of towns away after the death of a Jimmy family member the old beach had seen serious erosion, serious stinks and serious decay of the already in their day ancient seawalls and no longer held the fancy of the young who back in the day wanted to go parking there at night to “watch the submarine races.” (For the clueless that is an old local custom gag because looking for midnight submarines off shore was not what was going on in the back seat of some Wally’s car.) Also the beach no longer served as a coming of age spot for winter-weary guys watching winter-weary well-tanned girls in skimpy bikinis between the yacht clubs hot spot for such activity. In fact Red said that last time he checked on a hot July summer’s day at high noon nobody, young or old, was in that sacred spot.   

Red Rowley who was the youngest boy in the Rowley household and who had been afraid of girls, not closet gay or gay afraid, but just afraid of girls and their ways had like a lot of Irish guys who took their stern religious upbringing too seriously never married and had stayed in town the whole time, stayed in the same house, and once his mother’s health declined after his father died never thought to leave. So Red could, as an old fixture like the street lights, see what changes had occurred around town. And he would ask young people, some of who were interested in talking to him, what they were up to, what they knew about the old time customs of the high school and of the town.

Hell, Red said, the young guys in the neighborhood didn’t know what he was talking about when he mentioned “watching the submarine races,” that old code word for getting in the back seat of an automobile (or if car-less and desperate on a skimpy beach blanket against that stony sand) with a girl and seeing what was what, coming up for air to check for any midnight submarine sightings. One guy even asked how one could see a submarine at night if one was in the neighborhood of the beach. Jesus. Also they, and here Red meant both sexes, had no idea on this good green earth that those now old tumble-down yacht clubs in dire need of serious paint jobs after the slamming of the seas and the furious winds had done their work had been the site of many a daytime planning for the night heat sessions. Were clueless that guys would ogle girls there, thought it kind of, what did one of them, one of the girls, call it, yeah, sexist. Jesus doubled.   

Red, by the way, was one of those ancient Irish Catholic corner boys who had stayed in town to help mother in order to have clean socks and regular six o’clock suppers without the bother of matrimony but also like Jimmy, hell, like Sam Lowell and every guy who breathed their first breaths off an off-hand sea breeze, also stayed to be near the ocean too. But Red had mainly watched the town change from an old way station for the Irish and Italians to the South Shore upward mobile digs further south to a “stay put” moving from the big city immigrant community which he was not particularly happy about since he could not speak any of the new languages (frankly in high school he had serious trouble with the English language) or understand the cultural differences when they, the collective mix of immigrants none from European homelands, did not bend at the knees in homage on Saint Patrick’s Day. But Red’s trouble with the new world of America (not really so new since these shores since the sixteen hundreds had seen wave after wave of immigrants just back then they had been from Europe, or had been Africa branded), or the real condition of Adamsville Beach was not what had exercised Jimmy on that trip to Big Sur with Miranda but about the old beach days, the now fantastic beach days.

Jimmy had chuckled to himself when he told Miranda- “Did we go to said beach to be “one” with our homeland, the sea? You know to connect with old King Neptune, our father, the father that we did not know, who would work his mysterious furies in good times and bad. Or to connect as one with denizens of the deep, fishes, whales, plankton, stuff like that. No.” Then he went down the litany of other possible motives just as a little good-humored exercise. “Did we go to admire the boats and other things floating by? The fleet of small sailboats that dotted the horizon in the seemingly never-ending tacking to the wind or the fewer big boats, big ocean-worthy boats that took their passenger far out to sea, maybe to search for whales or other sea creatures? No.” “Did we go to get a little breeze across our sun-burned and battered bodies on a hot and sultry August summer day?” Jimmy, a blushed red lobster in short sunlight who was sensitive about that red skin business declared a loud “No,” although Red, Frankie, Peter, and Josh, his other comrade corner boys less sensitive to the sun would have answered, well, maybe a little.

Jimmy said that he soon tired of those non-reasons, this little badger game, and got to the heart of the matter, laughed to himself as he thought and then mentioned to Miranda-“Come on now we are talking about sixteen, maybe seventeen, year old guys. They, every self-respecting corner boy who could put towel and trunks together, which meant everybody except Johnny Kelly who had to work during the day in the summer to help support his mother and fatherless younger brothers and sisters , were there, of course, because there were shapely teeny-weeny bikini-clad girls [young women, okay, let’s not get technical about that pre-woman’s liberation time] sunning themselves like peacocks for all the world, all the male teenage North Adamsville world, the only world that mattered to guys and gals alike, to see. Had been sunning themselves in such a manner since bikinis and less replaced those old-time bathing suits that were slightly less cumbersome that the street clothes you saw in your old grandmother’s scrapbook. And guys had been hormonally-charged looking at them that long as well.”

“Here is the catch thought,” Jimmy continued. “They, and they could be anywhere from about junior high to the first couple of years in college although they tended to separate themselves out by age bracket were sunning themselves and otherwise looking very desirable and, well, fetching, in not just any old spot wherever they could place a blanket but strictly, as tradition dictated, tradition seemingly going back before memory, between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. So, naturally, every testosterone-driven teenage lad who owned a bathing suit, and some who didn’t, were hanging off the floating dock right in front of said yacht clubs showing off, well, showing off their prowess to the flower of North Adamsville maidenhood.” And said show-offs included, Jimmy, of course, Frankie Riley (when he was not working early mornings at the old A&P Supermarket and did not show until later in the afternoon), his faithful scribe, Pete Markin (who seemingly wrote down for posterity every word Frankie uttered and some that he did not, and others including the, then anyway, “runt of the litter,” Johnny Silver. And Sam Lowell too.

It is Johnny’s sad beach blanket bingo tale that Jimmy had suddenly thought about when he had driven pass the old beach one day to confirm Red’s recent beach judgment mentioned at the funeral parlor and wanted to relate to Miranda as the over the top waves pummeled the scarred rock faces in the secluded reaches of Big Sur to give her an idea of what the sea meant to a lot of guys he knew. If, in the Jimmy telling, it all sounds kind of familiar, too familiar even to old time non-corner boys, to those who do not live near the oceans of the world, to the younger set who may have a different view of life than what carried the day back then, it is because, with the exception of the musical selections, it is. This is how it all started though:

“The next girl who throws sand in my face is going get it,” yelled Johnny Silver to no one in particular as he came back to the Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boy summer beach front acreage just in front of the seawall facing, squarely facing, the midpoint between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. “For the clueless,” and Jimmy assumed Miranda was in that vast company so he took pains to spell it out, “the corner boy world in North Adamsville, hell, maybe every corner boy world everywhere meant that you had certain “turf” issues in your life not all of them settled with fists, although an issue like some alien corner boy looking the wrong way at one of the Salducci girls could only be resolved that way.” But mostly it was a matter of traditions, traditional spots which the “unwritten law” held for certain groups and the spot between the boat clubs was theirs, and had been the “property” of successive generations of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys since at least the end of World War II when Frankie Riley’s father and his corner boys, some very tough boys transplanted from South Boston to work in the shipyards and some restless guys who had like Frankie’s father served in the war but were not ready to settle down “claimed” the spot.”       

Johnny, after having his say, fumed at no one in particular as the sounds of Elvis Presley’s Loving You came over Frankie Riley’s transistor radio and had wafted down to the sea, almost like a siren call to teenage love. Then one of those “no one in particulars,” Pete Markin replied, “What did you expect, Johnny? That Katy Larkin is too tall, too pretty and just flat-out too foxy for a runt like you. I am surprised you are still in one piece. And I would mention, as well, that her brother, ‘Jimmy Jukes,’ does not like guys, especially runt guys with no muscles bothering his sister.” Johnny came back quickly with the usual, “Hey, I am not that small and I am growing, growing fast so Jimmy Jukes can eat my… ” But Johnny halted just in time as one Jimmy Jukes, James Allen Larkin, halfback hero of many a North Adamsville fall football game running opponent defensive players raggedy in his wake, came perilously close to Johnny and then veered off like Johnny was nothing, nada, nunca, nothing. And after Jimmy Jukes was safely out of sight, and Frankie flipped the volume dial on his radio louder as the Falcons’ You’re So Fine came on heralding Frankie’s attempt by osmosis to lure a certain Betty Ann McCarthy, another standard brand fox in the teenage girl be-bop night, his way Johnny poured out the details of his sad saga.

Seems that Katy Larkin was in one of Johnny’s classes, biology he said, and one day, one late spring day Katy, out of the blue, asked him what he thought about Buddy Holly who had passed away in crash several years before, well before he reached his potential as the new king of the be-bop rock night. Johnny answered that Buddy was “boss,” especially his Everyday, and that got them talking, but only talking, almost every day until the end of school. Of course, Johnny, runt Johnny, didn’t have the nerve, not nearly enough nerve to ask a serious fox like Katy out, big brother or not, before school let out for the summer. Not until that very day when he got up the nerve to go over to her blanket, a blanket that also had Sara Bigelow and Tammy Kelly on board, and as a starter asked Katy if she liked Elvis’ That’s When The Heartache Begins.

Katy answered quickly and rather curtly (although Johnny did not pick up on that signal) that it was “dreamy the way Elvis sang it, but sad when you think about all the trouble guys bring when they mess with another boy’s girl.” Then Johnny’s big moment came and he blurted out, “Do you want to go to the Surf Dance Hall with me Saturday night? Crazy Lazy is the DJ and the Rockin’ Ramrods are playing?” And as the reader knows, or should be presumed to know, Johnny’s answer was a face full of sand. And that sad, sad beach saga is the end of another teen angst moment. So to the strains coming from Tammy’s radio of Robert and Johnny’s We Belong Together we will move along.

Well, not quite. It also seems that Katy Larkin, tall (too tall for Johnny, really), shapely (no question of “really” about that), and don’t forget foxy Katy Larkin had had a “crush” since they had first started talking in class on one John Raymond Silver if you can believe that. She was miffed, apparently more than somewhat, that Johnny had not asked her out before school got out for the summer. That “more than somewhat” entailed throwing sand in Johnny’s face when he did get up the nerve to ask. And nothing else happened between them for the rest of the summer, except Johnny always seemed kind of miserable when he leaned up against the wall in front of Salducci’s to confer with his corner boys about life being kind of crazy. But get this- on the first day of school, while Johnny was turning his radio off and putting it in his locker just before school started, after having just listened to the Platters One In a Million for the umpteenth time, Katy Larkin “cornered” (Johnny’s term) 

Johnny and said in a clear, if excited voice, “I’m sorry about that day at the beach last summer.” And then in the teenage girl imperative, hell maybe all women imperative, “You are taking me to the Fall All-Class Mixer and I will not take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Well, what is a guy to do when that teenage girl imperative, hell, maybe all women imperative voice commands. After that Johnny started to re-evaluate his attitude toward beach sand and thought maybe, after all, it was just a girl being playful. In any case, Johnny had grown quite a bit that summer and it turned out that Katy Larkin was not too tall, not too tall at all, for Johnny Silver to take to the mixer, or anywhere else she decided she wanted to go. “

Here is what Jimmy told Miranda that Big Sur day to put a philosophical twist on the whole episode fifty years later.  After stopping his car toward the middle of Adamsville Beach, the place between the two yacht clubs where he and the Salducci corner boys hung out, the two clubs whose appearance that day spoke to a need of paint and other fixing up, the place that had stirred his memoires that day Jimmy Callahan thought Red had it all wrong, all wrong indeed, it had nothing to do with the condition of the clubs, the beach, the sand, the waves or the boats. Mr. John Raymond Silver and Ms. Katy Silver (nee Larkin), now of Naples, Florida, are proof of that statement.