An Encore -Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- The Time Of Motorcycle Bill-Take Two

An Encore -Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- The Time Of Motorcycle Bill-Take Two

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

[My old friend, Sam Lowell, whom I have known since the summer of love days out in Frisco days in the late 1960s when we though all the world could be turned upside down and we were the hail fellows, well met who were going to help do it and all we got for our troubles was tear gas, cops' nightsticks and the bastinado for our efforts, oh yeah, and forty year blow-back from the night-takers, and who hails from Carver down in Massachusetts asked me to fill in a few more details about this relationship between Motorcycle Bill and Lily. He thought I was originally kind of skimpy on why a nice Catholic girl would go all to pieces over a motorcycle guy, would get on his bike like she was some low-rent tart from the wrong side of town the usual type that went for motorcycle guys in his book. Sam didn’t get the idea that when that cycle surge came along just like us with the heroic antics of the summer of love lots of ordinary teens went with the flow. So here is a little extra, a take two for Sam, and maybe for others who missed that big motorcycle moment.]      

 ********

There was a scourge in the land, in the 1950s American land. No, not the one you are thinking of from your youth or from your history book, not the dreaded but fatalistically expected BIG ONE, the mega-bomb that would send old mother earth back to square one, or worst, maybe only the amoebas would survive to start the long train of civilization up the hill once again. Everybody expected that blow to come if it did come and we in America were not vigilant, did not keep our shoulders to the wheel and not ask questions from the nefarious Russkies (of course we that were just coming to age in the rock and roll night would not have had a clue as to what questions to ask if asking questions was acceptable then and it was not and we as young as were knew that it was not from parents to teachers to Grandpa Ike and his cabinet). We, if not vigilant, would take it in the back from a guy named Joe Stalin which one of our teachers said meant “steel” in Russian but it could have been from any Russian guy as we learned later after Stalin died and other atomic bomb-wielding guys took over in Red Square.

Sure that red scare Cold War was in the air and every school boy and girl had their giggling tales of having to hide, hide ass up, under some desk or other useless defense in air raid drill preparations for that eventually. I wasn’t any revolutionary or radical or “red” although one teacher looked at me kind of funny when I mentioned it but I couldn’t get behind the purpose of hiding under some old-timey elementary school wooden desk when every film I ever saw of what an atomic blast looked like said you might as well not have your ass sticking up in the air when Armageddon came. Like I said one teacher looked at me very funny. So sure the air stunk of red scare, military build-up cold war “your mommy is a commie turn her in" (and there were foolish kids who did try to use that ploy when dear mother said no to some perfectly reasonable request and junior thought to get even he would rat her out).

But the red scare, the Cold War ice tamp down on society to go along to get along was not the day to day scare for every self-respecting parent from Portsmouth to the Pacific. That fear was reserved for the deadly dreaded motorcycle scare that had every father telling his son to beware of falling under the Marlon Brando sway once they had seen the man complete with leather jacket, rakish cap and surly snarl playing Johnny Bad in The Wild One at the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon and deciding contrary to the cautionary tale of the film that these Johnnies were losers spiraling down to a life, a low life of crime and debauchery (of course said son not knowing of the word, the meaning of debauchery, until much later) just shrugged his innocent shoulders.

More importantly, more in need of a five alarm warning, every mother, every blessed mother, self-respecting or not, secretly thinking maybe a toss in the hay with Marlon would bring some spice to her otherwise staid ranch house with breezeway existence warned off their daughters against this madness and perversity in leather. Warned those gleaming-eyed daughters also fresh from the Saturday afternoon matinee Stand Theater to not even think about hanging with such rascals contrary to the lesson that cute waitress in the film gave about blowing Johnny off as so much bad air. (Of course forgetting, as dad had with junior, to bring up the question of sex which is what Sissy had on her mind after one look at that cool attire of Johnny and her dream about how she could get that surly smirk off of his face.)     

Of course that did not stop the wayward sons of millworkers slated for work in the mills when their times came from mooning over every Harley cat that rode his ride down Main Street, Olde Saco (really U.S. Route One but everybody called it Main Street and it was) or the daughters slated for early motherhood under proper marriage or maybe sales clerks in the Monmouth Store from mooning (and maybe more) over the low- riders churning the metal on those bad ass machines when they went with their girlfriends over to Old Orchard Beach on sultry sweaty weekend nights in summer.

This is how bad things were, how the cool cats on the bikes sucked the air out of any other guys who were looking for, well, looking whatever they could get from the bevies of girls watching their every move like hawks. Even prime and proper Lily Dumont, the queen of Saint Brigitte’s Catholic Church rectitude on Sunday and wanna-be “mama” every other waking minute of late. Now this Lily was “hot” no question so hot that my best friend in high school Rene Dubois, the best looking guy around the Acre where we all lived and who already had two girlfriends (and later in life would have four, count them, four wives before he gave the marriage game up and just shacked up with whatever romantic interest he had at the moment), would go to eight o’clock Mass every Sunday and sit a couple of rows in back of her and just watch her ass. (I know because I was sitting beside him watching that same ass).

He never got anywhere with her, she knew about the two girlfriends since they were friends of hers, and neither did I. Lily was a classic French-Canadian beauty long thin legs, petite shape but with nice curves, long black hair and pop-out blue eyes. Nice but like I said but strictly the ice queen as far as we could tell. Especially when she would constantly talk about her friendship with Jesus and the need to say plenty of rosaries and attend many novenas to keep in touch with him.        

In this time of the motorcycle craze though something awoken in her, maybe just the realization that Jesus was okay but guys who thought she was hot maybe needed some tending too. In any case, and I didn’t find this out until several years later after Lily had left town, my sister who was one of Lily’s close friends then and Lily could confide girl talk to her during this motorcycle dust up Lily would find herself restless at night, late at night and contrary to all good Catholic teachings would put her hand in a place where she shouldn’t (this is the way my sister put it you know Lily was just playing  with herself a perfectly natural feeling for teenagers, and older people too) and she was embarrassed about it, didn’t know if she could go to confession and say what sin she committed to old Father Pierre. I don’t know if she ever did confess or things got resolved a different way and that idea was out of play but there you have it.     

And the object of her desire? One “Motorcycle Bill,” the baddest low- rider in all of Olde Saco. Now baddest in Olde Saco (that’s up in ocean edge Maine for the heathens and others not in the know) was not exactly baddest in the whole wide world, nowhere as near as bad as say Sonny Barger and his henchmen outlaws-for- real bikers out in Hell’s Angels Oakland as chronicled by Doctor Gonzo (before he was Gonzo), Hunter S. Thompson in his saga of murder and mayhem sociological- literary study Hell’s Angels. But as much is true in life one must accept the context. And the context here is that in sleepy dying mill town Olde Saco mere ownership, hell maybe mere desire for ownership, of a bike was prima facie evidence of badness. So every precious daughter was specifically warned away from Motorcycle Bill and his Vincent Black Lightning 1952 (although no mother, and maybe no daughter either, could probably tell the difference between that sleek English bike and a big pig Harley). But Madame Dumont felt no need to do so with her sweet sixteen Lily who, maybe, pretty please maybe was going to be one of god’s women, maybe enter the convent over in Cedars Of Lebanon Springs in a couple of years after she graduated from Olde Saco High along with her Class of 1960.

But that was before Motorcycle Bill appeared on the horizon. One afternoon after school walking home to Olde Saco’s French- Canadian (F-C) quarter, the Acre like I said where we all lived, all French-Canadians (on my mother’s side, nee LeBlanc for me) on Atlantic Avenue with classmate and best friend Clara Dubois (my sister was close to Lily but not as close as Clara since they had gone to elementary school together), Lily heard the thunder of Bill’s bike coming up behind them, stopping, Bill giving Lily a bow, and them revving the machine up and doing a couple of circle cuts within a hair’s breathe of the girls. Then just a suddenly he was off, and Lily, well, Lily was hooked, hooked on Motorcycle Bill, although she did not know it, know it for certain until that night in her room when she tossed and turned all night and did not ask god, or any of his associates, to guide her in the matter (the matter of that wayward hand for those who might have forgotten).

One thing about living in a sleepy old town, a sleepy old dying mill town, is that everybody knows everybody’s business at least as far as any person wants that information out on the public square. Two things are important before we go on. One is that everybody in town that counted which meant every junior and senior class high schooler in Olde Saco knew that Bill had made a “play” for Lily. And the buzz got its start from none other than Clara Dubois who had her own hankerings after the motorcycle man (her source of wonder though was more, well lets’ call it crass than Lily’s, Clara wanted to know if Bill was build, build with some sexual power, power like his motorcycle. She had innocently, perhaps, understood the Marlon mystique). The second was that Bill, other than his bike, was not a low life low- rider but just a guy who liked to ride the roads free and easy. See Bill was a freshman over at Bowdoin and he used the bike as much to get back and forth to school from his home in Scarborough as to do wheelies in front of impressionable teenage girls from the Acre.

One day, one afternoon, a few days after their Motorcycle Bill “introduction,” when Lily and Clara were over at Seal Rock at the far end of Olde Saco Beach Bill came up behind them sans his bike. (Not its real name but had been given the name Seal Rock because the place was the local lovers’ lane at night and many things had been sealed there including a fair share of “doing the do,” you know hard and serious sex. During the day it was just a good place to catch a sea breeze and look for interesting clam shells which washed up in the swirling surf there.) Now not on his bike, without a helmet, and carrying books, books of all things, he looked like any student except maybe a little bolder and a little less reserved.

He started talking to Lily and something in his demeanor attracted her to him. (Clara swore, swore on seven bibles, that Lily was kind of stand-offish at first but Lily said no, said she was just blushing  a lot.) They talked for a while and then Bill asked Lily if she wanted a ride home. She hemmed and hawed but there was just something about him that spoke of mystery (who knows what Clara thought about what Lily thought about that idea). She agreed and they walked a couple of blocks to where he was parked. And there Lily saw that Vincent Black Lightning 1952 of her dreams. Without a word, without anything done by her except to tie her hair back and unbutton a couple of buttons from her starched white shirt she climbed on the back of the bike at Bill’s beckon. And that is how one Lily Dumont became William Kelly’s motorcycle “mama” when the high tide of the motorcycle as sex symbol hit our town.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-You Got That Right Brother-The Blues Ain’t Nothing But A Good Woman On Your Mind -With Arthur Alexander's Anna In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-You Got That Right Brother-The Blues Ain’t Nothing But A Good Woman On Your Mind -With Arthur Alexander's Anna In Mind  

A YouTube film clip of Arthur Alexander performing his classic Anna later coveted on a cover by the Beatles.

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Who said it, Tupac or Biggy Smalls, Tupac now that I think about it, that “Christmas kind of missed us, birthdays were the worst days” in growing up poor wherever they hailed from. That sure was the case, despite the difference in race, not an unimportant in haughty white bread America now, or then, in my growing up Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where the wanting habits were just as hunger-driven as any community of color on the economic level. In the story below the kid is causing holy hell and damnation because she can’t get some modern gizmo to seem hip or something. I knew the kid who the story was based on and even he will say he was being weird when compared to my even poorer existence. Painful as it is to speak of even today when I have cash and credit to see me through we didn’t even have that margin to get some extra gizmo, not even close.

My mother was the world champion at “the envelopes” each weekly payday. Those enveloped neatly marked in her steady for all the various bills due each week. Of course, never, never as far as I remember did the dough match the bills, and so the envelopes were divvied up on the basic of lateness due and on giving just enough money to not be evicted, or dunned for a million bills. She had the thing down to a science about how much she could tender without ever getting straight. If things were really bad and I could always tell before I got old enough to refuse to do the dirty work anymore she would sent me hat in hand to pay let’s say the rent with my dour face hopefully I would not get yelled at by the clerk who seemed to thing we were stiffing her personally. The stoolie thing worked though since we never were evicted as close at things were at times. 

Worse, worse in growing up in the serious golden age of the automobile in America in the days when every self-respecting family had an automobile and exchanged for a new version every three years we walked, walked everywhere and on the few occasions when we did have a car the thing was a monster that I was ashamed to be seen in and so I walked, walked desperate walks of shame. So can you really be naïve enough to feign wondering why when corner boy time came and Scribe figured out ways to get dough without much risk I was in with all my hands. Allan Jackson]       

*********** 

Johnny Prescott daydreamed his way through the music that he was listening to just then on the little transistor radio that Ma Prescott, Martha to adults, and Pa too, Paul to adults, but the main battles over the gift had been with Ma, had given him for Christmas. In those days we are talking about, the post-World War II red scare Cold War 1950s in America, the days of the dreamy man in the family being the sole provider fathers didn’t get embroiled in the day to day household kids wars and remained a distant and at times foreboding presence called in only when the dust-up had gotten out of hand. And then Papa pulled the hammer down via a classic united front with Ma. Johnny had taken a fit around the first week in December in 1960 when Ma quite reasonable suggested that a new set of ties to go with his white long-sleeved shirts might be a better gift, a better Christmas gift and more practical too, for a sixteen year old boy. Reasonable since alongside Pa being that sole provider, being a distant presence, and being called in only when World War III was about to erupt in the household he also worked like a slave for low wages at the Boston Gear Works, worked for low wages since he was an unskilled laborer in a world where skills paid money (and even the skills that he did have, farm hand skills, were not very useful in the Boston labor market). So yes ties, an item that at Christmas time usually would be the product of glad-handing grandmothers or maiden aunts would in the Prescott household be relegated to the immediate family. And that holiday along with Easter was a time when the Prescott boys had in previous years had gotten their semi-annual wardrobe additions, additions provided via the Bargain Center, a low-cost, low rent forerunner of the merchandise provided at Wal-Mart.                

This year, this sixteen year old year, Johnny said no to being pieced off with thick plaid ties, or worse, wide striped ties in color combinations like gold and black or some other uncool combination, uncool that year although maybe not in say 1952 when he did not know better, uncool in any case against those thin solid colored ties all the cool guys were wearing to the weekly Friday night school dances or the twice monthly Sacred Heart Parish dances the latter held in order to keep sixteen year old boys, girls too, in check against the worst excesses of what the parish priests (and thankful parents) thought was happening among the heathen young.

No, that is not quite right, that “Johnny said no” part, no, he screamed that he wanted a radio, a transistor radio, batteries included, of his own so that he could listen to whatever he liked up in his room, or wherever he was. Could listen to what he liked against errant younger brothers who were clueless, clueless about rock and roll, clueless about what was what coming through the radio heralding a new breeze in the land, a breeze Johnny was not sure what it meant but all he knew was that he, and his buddies, knew some jail-break movement was coming to unglue all the square-ness in the over- heated night. Could listen in privacy, and didn’t have to, understand, didn’t have to listen to some Vaughn Monroe or Harry James 1940s war drum thing on the huge immobile RCA radio monster downstairs in the Prescott living room. Didn’t have to listen to, endlessly Saturday night listen, captive nation-like listen to WJDA and the smooth music, you know, Frank Sinatra, Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, and so on listen to the music of Ma and Pa Prescott’s youth, the music that got them through the Depression and the war. Strictly squaresville, cubed.

Something was out of joint though, something had changed since he had begun his campaign the year before to get that transistor radio, something or someone had played false with the music that he had heard when somebody played the jukebox at Freddy’s Hamburger House where he heard Elvis, Buddy, Chuck, Wanda (who was hot, hot for a girl rocker, all flowing black hair and ruby red lips from what he had seen at Big Max’s Record Shop when her Let’s Have A Party was released), the Big Bopper, Jerry Lee, Bo, and a million others who made the whole world jump to a different tune, to something he could call his own. But as he listened to this Shangra-la by The Four Coins that had just finished up a few seconds ago and as this Banana Boat song by The Tarriers was starting its dreary trip through his brain he was not sure that those ties, thick or uncool as they would be, wouldn’t have been a better Christmas deal, and more practical too.

Yeah, this so-called rock station, WAPX, that he and his friends had been devoted to since 1957, had listened to avidly every night when Johnny Peeper, the Midnight Creeper and Leaping Lenny Penny held forth in their respective DJ slots, had sold out to, well, sold out to somebody, because except for late at night, midnight late at night, one could not hear the likes of Jerry Lee, Carl, Little Richard, Fats, and the new rocker blasts, now that Elvis had gone who knows where. Killer rocker Chuck Berry had said it best, had touched a youth nation nerve, had proclaimed the new dispensation when he had proclaimed loud and clear that Mr. Beethoven had better move alone, and said Mr. Beethoven best tell one and all of his confederates, including Mr. Tchaikovsky, that rock ‘n’ roll was the new sheriff in town. But where was Chuck, where was that rock blaster all sexed up talk and riffs to match now that everybody was reduced to Bobby Darin, Bobby Rydell, and Bobby, hell, they were all Bobbys and Jimmys and Eddies and every other vanilla name under the sun now not a righteous name in the house. As Johnny turned the volume down a little lower (that tells the tale right there, friends) as Rainbow (where the hell do they get these creepy songs from) by Russ Hamilton he was ready to throw in the towel though. Ready to face the fact that maybe, just maybe the jail-break that he desperately had been looking forward to might have been just a blip, might have been an illusion and that the world after all belonged to Bing, Frank, Tommy and Jimmy and that he better get used to that hard reality.   

Desperate, Johnny fingered the dial looking for some other station when he heard this crazy piano riff starting to breeze through the night air, the heated night air, and all of a sudden Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 blasted the airwaves. Ike whose Rocket 88 had been the champion choice of Jimmy Jenkins, one of his friends from after school, when they would sit endlessly in Freddy’s and seriously try to figure out whose song started the road to rock and roll. Johnny had latched onto Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll which Elvis did a smash cover of but who in Joe’s version you can definitely heart that dah-da-dah beat that was the calling card of his break-out generation, as well as the serious sexual innuendo which Frankie Riley explained to one and all one girl-less Friday night at the high school hop. Billy Bradley, a high school friend who had put an assortment of bands together and so knew more than the rest of them combined, had posited Elmore James’ Look Yonder Wall as his selection but nobody had ever heard the song then, or of James. Johnny later did give it some consideration after he had had heard the song when Billy’s band covered it and broke the place up.

But funny as Johnny listened that night it didn’t sound like the whinny Ike’s voice on Rocket 88 so he listened for a little longer, and as he later found out from the DJ, it had actually been a James Cotton Blues Band cover. After that band’s performance was finished fish-tailing right after that one was a huge harmonica intro and what could only be mad-hatter Junior Wells doing When My Baby Left Me splashed through. No need to turn the dial further now because what Johnny Prescott had found in the crazy night air, radio beams bouncing every which way, was direct from Chicago, and maybe right off those hard-hearted Maxwell streets was Be-Bop Benny’s Chicago Blues Radio Hour. Be-Bop Benny who everybody who read the rock and roll magazines found easier at Doc’s Drugstore over on Hancock Street knew, had started Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino on their careers, or helped.

Now Johnny, like every young high-schooler, every "with it" high schooler in the USA, had heard of this show, because even though everybody was crazy for rock and roll, just now the airwaves sounded like, well, sounded like music your parents would dance to, no, sit to at a dance, some kids still craved high rock. So this show was known mainly through the teenage grapevine but Johnny had never heard it before because, no way, no way in hell was his punk little Radio Shack transistor radio with two dinky batteries going to ever have enough strength to pick Be-Bop Benny’s show out in Chicago. So Johnny, and maybe rightly so, took this turn of events for a sign. When Johnny heard that distinctive tinkle of the Otis Spann piano warming up to Spann’s Stomp and jumped up with his Someday added in he was hooked. You know he started to see what Billy, Billy Bradley who had championed Elmore James way before anybody knew who he was, meant when at a school dance where he had been performing with his band, Billie and the Jets, he mentioned from the stage before introducing a song that if you wanted to get rock and roll back from the vanilla guys who had hijacked it while Jerry Lee, Chuck and Elvis had turned their backs then you had better listen to the blues. And if you wanted to listen to blues, blues that rocked then you had very definitely had better get in touch with the Chicago blues as they came north from Mississippi and places like that.

And Johnny thought, Johnny who have never been too much south of Gloversville, or west of Albany, and didn’t know too many people who had, couldn’t understand why that beat, that dah, da, dah, Chicago beat sounded like something out of the womb in his head. But when he heard Big Walter Horton wailing on that harmonica on Rockin’ My Boogie he knew it had to be in his genes.

Here’s the funniest part of all though later, later in the 1960s after everybody had become a serious aficionado of the blues either through exposure like Johnny to the country blues that got revived during the folk minute that flashed through the urban areas of the country and got big play at places like the Newport Folk Festival or like Jimmy Jenkins through the British rock invasion the blues became the dues. It was especially ironic that a bunch of guys from England like the Stones and Beatles were grabbing every freaking 45 RPM record they could get their mitts on. So if you listened to the early work of those groups you would find thing covered like Shake, Rattle and Roll (Big Joe’s version), Arthur Alexander’s Anna, Howlin’ Wolf’s Little Red Rooster and a ton of stuff by Muddy Waters. Yeah, the drought was over.               

Advocates to Demand Lawmakers Address Environmental Justice as Poor People’s Campaign Heads to Springfield

Advocates to Demand Lawmakers Address Environmental Justice

as Poor People’s Campaign Heads to Springfield

Springfield, MA — For the fourth consecutive week, poor people, clergy and advocates will rally in Massachusetts as their historic reignition of the Poor People’s Campaign this week demands lawmakers ensure everyone in Massachusetts has the right to healthcare and a healthy environment.

At least 42% of Springfield residents have incomes under $25,000. April was the 400^th month in a row with warmer than normal temperatures. Springfield is the #1 most challenging city in the U.S. to live with asthma, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

In Massachusetts, 379,100 people have no health insurance, 11 percent of census tracts are at-risk for being unable to afford water, and 10,452 tons of NOx, a leading cause of respiratory problems, are emitted yearly in Massachusetts.

Participants in Monday’s nonviolent direct action are expected to carry signs that read, “Health care is a moral issue”, “13.8 million U.S. households cannot afford water”, “Systemic change NOT climate change”, and “Why can we buy unleaded gas, but not unleaded water?”

The action in Massachusetts is one of three dozen nationwide. 

  

WHO:               Participants in Massachusetts Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral

                                    Revival, Arise for Social Justice, and Springfield Climate Justice Coalition

WHAT:              Protest at Springfield City Hall demanding immediate action to address environmental

                                    justice

WHERE:           Court Square, Springfield

WHEN:             Monday, June 4, 2018, 1-3pm

BACKGROUND:

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is co-organized by Repairers of the Breach, a social justice organization founded by the Rev. Barber; the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary; and hundreds of local and national grassroots groups across the country.

On May 14, campaign co-chairs the Revs. William J. Barber II and Liz Theoharis were among hundreds arrested nationwide in the most expansive wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in U.S. history, kicking off a six-week season of direct action demanding new programs to fight systemic poverty and racism, immediate attention to ecological devastation and measures to curb militarism and the war economy. Last week, they were arrested again, alongside the Rev. Jesse Jackson after staging a pray-in in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Hundreds more were arrested at capitols nationwide, including in Massachusetts.

The protests from coast to coast are reigniting the Poor People’s Campaign, the 1968 movement started by Dr. King and so many others to challenge racism, poverty and militarism. The Campaign is expected to be a multi-year effort, but over the first 40 days, poor and disenfranchised people, moral leaders and advocates are engaging in nonviolent direct action, including by mobilizing voters, knocking on tens of thousands of doors, and holding teach-ins, among other activities, as a moral fusion movement comprised of people of all races and religions takes off.

For the past two years, leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival have carried out a listening tour in dozens of states across this nation, meeting with tens of thousands of people from El Paso, Texas to Marks, Mississippi to South Charleston, West Virginia. Led by the Revs. Barber and Theoharis, the campaign has gathered testimonies from hundreds of poor people and listened to their demands for a better society.

A Poor People’s Campaign Moral Agenda, announced last month, was drawn from this listening tour, while an audit of America conducted with allied organizations, including the Institute for Policy Studies and the Urban Institute, showed that, in many ways, we are worse off than we were in 1968.

The Moral Agenda, which is guiding the 40 days of actions, calls for major changes to address systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative, including repeal of the 2017 federal tax law, implementation of federal and state living wage laws, universal single-payer health care, and clean water for all.

###

-- 

Savina Martin

Massachusetts Statewide Coordinating Chair (Eastern Region)

Cell: (339) 216.7181 

Email: massachusetts@poorpeoplescampagin.org

https://poorpeoplescampaign.org/

Michaelann Bewsee

Massachusetts Statewide Coordinating Chair (Western Region)

Arise for Social Justice, Springfield, MA

Khalil Saddiq, Legal Liaison

Massachusetts Statewide Coordinating Chair (Eastern Region)

"Forward Together NOT one step back!"

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"Not one step back"

Cole Harrison

Executive Director

Massachusetts Peace Action - the Commonwealth's largest grassroots peace organization

11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138

617-354-2169 w

617-466-9274 m

www.masspeaceaction.org

Facebook: facebook.com/masspeaceaction

Twitter: masspeaceaction

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On The Occasion Of The 170th Anniversary Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto”(1848)

On The Occasion Of The 170^th Anniversary Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto”(1848)

A link to the Karl Marwx Achives for an on-line copy of the Communist Manifesto  

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman

If anybody had asked me back when I was a kid, a kid growing up in the desperately poor, working poor but desperate nevertheless, Acre section of North Adamsville a town south of Boston in Massachusetts that I would be commemorating, no, honoring an anniversary of the publication in 1847 of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s seminal political document The Communist Manifesto in the year 2018 I would have said they were crazy. (I will not get into the issue of commemorating odd-ball year anniversaries of events, like a 170^th anniversary, which in general I abhor since I have beaten that dead horse elsewhere and in any case such a whole historic event as here would draw a worthy exemption). Not because the document was, is, not worthy of talking about but back in the day, back in my teenage days I was adamantly an anti-communist in the tradition of almost all red scare Cold War post-war baby boomers who came of age, political under the threat of the nuclear bomb (some things seem to never change given the recent saber-rattling over the developments in North Korea by the American government).

Some, at least from that baby-boomer generation who have at least heard about the document which I cannot say is true for Generation X or the Millennials since they were not born under the sign of the red scare in a post-Soviet world, may be surprised that a backward working class kid in 1950s America would even had snuck a peek at that besotted document for fear of being tainted by the red scare coppers as pinko-red commie turn him in and be done with it.  Except I was very interested in politics even then and had heard about The Communist Manifesto by some from their photographs nefarious heavily bearded German guys who wanted back in the 1800s to upset the whole applecart and henceforth the root of all evil, the root of the international Communist conspiracy that would kill us in or beds if we were not vigilant against “Uncle Joe,” his successors or their hangers-on throughout the world and especially those “traitors” in America.

I had first heard about The Communist Manifesto in a political way although I was naïve as hell about the whole situation and about who I was working with in 1960. In the fall of that year, the fall of the famous Kennedy-Nixon fight for the American presidency where I was a serious partisan for Kennedy, our local, Massachusetts local, Irishman who made good I was also very, very interested in nuclear disarmament (a subject I still am interested in as the world have not gotten qualitively safer from that threat) and had gone to the Boston Common and participated in an anti-nuclear bomb rally (as the youngest participant by far) along with others from SANE (Doctor Spock’s organization) who had called the demonstration, the Quakers, and others. (Those others would include I later found out, many years later, members of the American Communist Party but not under that name but that of some “front” group. Of course by that time several years later I would have gone through three stages about American Communist Party members-from ho-hum so what if they are Commies we need all the forces we can muster to oppose the Vietnam War to being glad they were organizing like crazy against that war to disdain as they attempted to corral the youth movement into building bigger and better demonstrations against the war when that idea had worn out.) What got me going was when a bunch of people, guys, were harassing us, calling us “reds” and why didn’t we get the hell out of America and go to the Soviet Union. Along the way somebody, some guy mentioned The Communist Manifesto by that “Jew” Karl Marx. I had never hear of it although I was familiar with the name Karl Marx.               

Here’s the funny thing, funny in retrospect anyhow, I could not when I was interested in checking the Manifesto out for myself, find a copy in the school library or the public library. I never did find out the reason why and I was too timid once I saw it was not in the card catalogues to ask a librarian. Thus the way I got the document was looking through publications put out by the Government Printing Office, the U.S. government’s official printing operation. The reason they had printed it at the time, and it said right on the front page was that it had been a document used by the House Un-American Activities Committee and thus was part of the record of that nefarious entity (which in 1960 I think I found out later was almost run out of San Francisco by the demonstrations against it-one of the first breaks in the red scare Cold War phalanx).     

I made no pretense at the time nor do I now that I understood all that Marx was trying to get at. Certainly was clueless about the various polemics in Section Four against various other mostly pro-socialist opponents. (That part made greater sense later when I swear I went through almost every one of those oppositional ideas before coming to Marxism except maybe that exotic “feudal socialism” Marx vented against). What drew me in, although only haltingly at the time, was the idea that working people, my people, my family and friends, would get a better shake out of a socialist society, out of a classless society than we were getting at the time. But in those days I was hung up on some kind of career as a political operative, remember that Kennedy point earlier (not a candidate but the guy behind the candidate). So while I was never hostile to the ideas in that document and maybe have even been a “closet” social democrat masquerading as a liberal there was nothing operative for me then, certainly I was not in favor of revolution as the way forward for myself or my people.                

What changed things? I have written elsewhere about my induction into the American Army during the height of the Vietnam War and what that meant to me-and how I reacted to it by becoming a serious anti-war person (before I had been anti-war but in a wishy-washy way). Even then after I gave up the idea of a “normal” political career (that operative behind the scenes business) I was no Marxist but was in a search for some kind of way to change society short of revolution. (That is the period when I was engaging in those activities similar to the ones proposed by the groups Marx was polemicizing against in the Manifesto.)         

By 1971 it was clear that the American government under Nixon (that same Nixon was beaten to a gong by Kennedy) was not going to end the war in Vietnam. Didn’t give a damn about the whole thing. At that time I was hanging around a radical commune in Cambridge where we were trying to work out ideas (in isolation) about ending the fucking thing. That was the year on May Day when under the banner “if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government” we attempted to do just that. Heady stuff and a dramatic move to the left on my part. All we got for that effort was tear gas, the police baton, and some days in Robert Kennedy Stadium (ironic, huh) for many thousands of good radicals and no end to the war.      

After that I, having picked up a copy of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto at the Red Bookstore in Cambridge,  began to sense that our isolated efforts were self-defeating if we didn’t have a larger force to bring down the damn system. Didn’t have in Marxian terms a class with the objective self-interest to lead the overturn. At the time, given the hostile attitude of the real American working class to us and to any ideas of socialism for the most part, I was unsure that such a strategy made sense.  What I knew was that was where the work had to be done. It has not been a fruitful struggle but nevertheless a necessary one even today when such ideas seem even more utopian than in my young adulthood. Some of what Marx talked about needs serious updating but the general premise of class struggle and the revolution as way forward as still solid. Just look around. Are the capitalists (the right now winning capitalists in the one-sided class war) going to give anything of value up? No way- we will have to take it away from them if we want to get that equalitarian society we dreamed about in our youth. As for the Manifesto a lot of it still reads like it was written yesterday.               

A View From The British Left - Britain: Propaganda Offensive Targets Russia Cloak, Dagger and Poison Pen

Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

Britain: Propaganda Offensive Targets Russia

Cloak, Dagger and Poison Pen

The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 241 (Spring 2018), published by our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain.

6 APRIL—Theresa May’s discredited Tory government seized on the alleged poisoning of ex-MI6 spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on 4 March to launch a new anti-Russia propaganda offensive. While providing zero evidence of Russian involvement, Westminster has been demanding that its NATO and EU [European Union] cronies take action against Moscow, insisting that Russia is responsible for “an assault on British sovereignty” and an “unlawful use of force.” In fact, on 3 April the head of Britain’s chemical weapons research unit at Porton Down admitted that its technical analysis could not establish that the substance originated in Russia.

The British imperialists certainly know a thing or two about assaults on sovereignty and use of force, “lawful” or not! As the Chartist Ernest Jones noted of the British empire in 1851, “On its colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries.” And the loss of most of its colonies hasn’t stopped the imperialist slaughter. Britain maintains hundreds of troops in Afghanistan, and since 2014 British aircraft and drones have carried out over 1,600 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. London has also been fully backing the horrific Saudi war in Yemen, in which over 10,000 people have been killed. This past 6 March marked the 30th anniversary of the cold-blooded assassination by the SAS [Britain’s special forces] of Mairéad Farrell, Daniel McCann and Seán Savage, unarmed IRA militants, in Gibraltar.

The government has so far evinced more bark than bite towards Russia: the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats, increased inspections of Russian imports and flights and threats to freeze Russian state assets. (The announcement that no member of Britain’s Saxe-Coburg dynasty will be attending the World Cup [in Russia] means there will be at least one place on earth to escape the spectacle of inbred class privilege that is the royal wedding.)

In co-ordination with Britain, the U.S. expelled 60 Russian diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle. The EU has stated that it “takes extremely seriously the UK Government’s assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible” for the Salisbury poisonings. This statement was less forceful than the May government wanted, reflecting differences within and between the European ruling classes over how forcefully to pursue the anti-Russia agenda. Nonetheless, the EU voted to extend economic sanctions against Russia until September of this year, and most EU countries expelled Russian diplomats.

The British imperialists, under the wing of their senior U.S. partners, have been stepping up provocations against Russia since February 2014, when a fascist-spearheaded coup in Ukraine was engineered by Washington with the assistance of the EU. While screaming bloody murder over Russian “aggression,” the imperialist NATO alliance has been expanding into Eastern Europe. NATO has established four “Enhanced Forward Presence” battle groups on Russia’s border, including the largest deployment of U.S. tanks since the fall of the Soviet Union. Britain is in command of the operation in Estonia, which comprises some 800 British and 300 French troops.

This belligerence towards Putin’s regime is rooted in the imperialist powers’ determination to keep Russia out of their club. Arising out of the capitalist counterrevolution which destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92, capitalist Russia inherited a large nuclear arsenal and significant (though less advanced) industrial base in a country with vast natural resources. Where imperialist countries are characterised by the export of capital, Russia mainly exports oil and other natural resources, as well as weapons. Russia is today essentially a regional capitalist power, albeit with imperialist ambitions.

The imperialists intervene throughout the world in their drive to control markets, raw materials and cheap labour. Russia does not play a role in the carve-up of the world on a global scale. Its main military campaigns, with the recent exception of Syria, have been within the borders of the former Soviet Union. These included two brutal wars to prevent the oppressed nation of Chechnya from exercising its right to self-determination by seceding.

In contrast, Russia’s reclaiming of Crimea, following the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was overwhelmingly welcomed by Crimea’s majority Russian population. The imperialists nonetheless branded Russia’s move an act of totalitarian military aggression. (See “Crimea Is Russian,” Workers Hammer No. 226, Spring 2014.) Likewise the vote in the ethnically mixed but predominantly Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk to separate from Ukraine was an elementary expression of national self-determination that the international working class should defend.

Jeremy Corbyn got a lot of flak for the 14 March statement by his spokesman Seumas Milne that the government’s confidential briefings did not in fact contain convincing evidence of Russian involvement in poisoning the Skripals. Corbyn and Milne aptly compared the claims about Russian chemical weapons to the bogus “evidence” of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the [Tony] Blair government used as a pretext for joining the U.S. in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Not that the lack of any evidence prevented “her majesty’s loyal opposition” supporting the Tories’ anti-Russia measures. In fact, Corbyn went even further, demanding that “Russian money be excluded from our political system.”

This was echoed by the Socialist Party, who grotesquely lined up behind the government’s anti-Russia offensive by calling for the working class to impose sanctions not just against “the Russian super-rich but also against the Chinese, Asian and other oligarchs who control great chunks of London and other European capitals” (socialistparty.org.uk, 16 March). The Socialist Party have really outdone themselves! While alibiing the British bourgeoisie, who control London and (along with remnants of the British aristocracy) are the main beneficiaries of rent-gouging and property speculation, the Socialist Party endorses not only the campaign against Russia but also the drive for capitalist counterrevolution in the Chinese deformed workers state.

The British government insists it is acting in the interests of humanity in denouncing Russia’s alleged use of a chemical weapon. The reality is that the imperialists are fully prepared to use any means, including poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction, in pursuit of their interests. When imperialist forces intervened in Soviet Russia in 1919 in a failed attempt to crush the October Revolution, British warplanes bombarded Red Army troops with a chemical agent. That same year, when Kurds in Mesopotamia rose in revolt against British occupation, Winston Churchill declared: “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas.... I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”

Porton Down, less than ten miles from Salisbury, was the site of 30,000 chemical weapons experiments on British soldiers between 1945 and 1989. It is possible the Skripals were poisoned by a chemical weapon produced in Russia or at a former Soviet chemical weapons lab in Uzbekistan or at Porton Down. But the fact remains that the imperialist powers are the most deadly danger facing humanity. Having cut social services like the National Health Service (NHS) to the bone, slashed wages and unleashed massive spying on the population, the British ruling class is now banging the war drums against Moscow. It is in the interests of the working people of Britain and the world to oppose this imperialist war-mongering, as part of the struggle to oust the imperialist butchers and to bring the working class to power across the globe.

A View From The American Left- Texas Black Woman Jailed...for Voting

Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

Texas

Black Woman Jailed...for Voting

The right to vote is said to be sacred in the “land of the free,” a cure-all for every injustice visited upon working people and the downtrodden. Every time a rotten contract is crammed down the throats of a unionized workforce by the bosses; every time a black youth is shot dead in the streets by racist police; every time an immigrant child is torn from his mother’s arms by Homeland Security, working people are peddled the lie that they can change things at the ballot box. But the entire history of this country proves that, for the bourgeoisie, the franchise was never meant for everyone, and that goes double for black people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Great State of Texas.” To this day, the political fabric of Texas is shaped by the 19th-century conspiracy whose purpose was to expand black chattel slavery into the Southwest by robbing Mexico of millions of acres of its territory.

On March 28, a vindictive Texas state judge sentenced 43-year-old Crystal Mason, a black woman, to five years behind bars for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential elections. That November, after her mother insisted that she drive in the rain to the polls, Mason voted in southern Tarrant County near Fort Worth. Mason had already been on federal supervised release for a year following the completion of a five-year prison term for a minor tax fraud conviction. According to Texas law, convicted felons are barred from voting until they have completed their sentences, including probation or parole. But Mason had never been told by anyone that she could not vote. She is out on bail and has filed a motion for a new trial. Drop all charges against Crystal Mason!

Mason’s provisional ballot was rejected and her vote never counted in the first place. In her appeal, her lawyer asserts that the state election statute is ambiguous with regard to federal supervised release, which differs substantially from parole. Mason says she may never vote again. Indeed, that is the point and the intended effect of her outrageous sentence, meant as a message to all black people and everyone else the rulers want to exclude from the “political process.”

In February 2017, another Texas woman, 37-year-old Rosa Maria Ortega, was sentenced to eight years in prison for voting in the 2012 and 2014 elections. Ortega is a permanent U.S. resident of Mexican descent who grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. A working-class mother of four teenagers, all U.S. citizens, Ortega did not realize that green card holders are not allowed to vote. “I thought I was doing something right for my country,” Ortega told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (13 February 2017). Having voted Republican, she is now the poster child for Trumpian claims of rampant ballot fraud. She is currently out on bond pending an appeal of her sentence. After Ortega’s conviction, the vicious Texas attorney general Ken Paxton gloated: “This case shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure, and the outcome sends a message that violators of the state’s election law will be prosecuted to the fullest.”

It is a bitter irony that Ortega faces prison and deportation from Texas, a state formed on land that the U.S. stole from Mexico. Between 1848 and 1928, at least 232 people of Mexican descent were lynched in Texas. Under a system known as “Juan Crow,” Mexican Americans were banned from restaurants and deprived of basic democratic rights. In addition to targeting black voters, the attacks on voting rights in Texas today are also aimed at disenfranchising Mexican Americans and other Latinos, who make up 40 percent of the state’s population.

Everyone who lives in this country should have full and equal democratic rights. We oppose any restrictions on the rights of prisoners and released felons to vote. As part of our fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, we call for full voting rights for all immigrants, whether legal or “illegal.” These non-citizens who live under the class dictatorship of America’s rulers and their laws make up 7 percent of the total population—i.e., millions of people are denied full political rights.

The U.S. was built on the notion that “the people who own the country ought to govern it,” as the first Chief Justice, John Jay, put it. Originally, the franchise was restricted to property-owning white men. The bloody system of chattel slavery was enshrined in the Constitution. The deal that specified that slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person when it came to determining representation gave the Southern slaveowners control of Washington. It took decades of struggle to expand the vote to poor white men, the Civil War to smash slavery and extend the franchise to black men, and it wasn’t until 1920 that women got the vote.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed under the pressure of the mass civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Black youth and working people, along with white activists, displayed enormous courage and succeeded in getting the racist rulers to grant some formal democratic rights, such as the right to vote and an end to official legal segregation in the South. The Act was expanded in 1975 to address racist discrimination against Mexican Americans, not least in Texas.

In 2013, the Supreme Court took a knife to the Voting Rights Act, using the absurd rationale that racism in the U.S. had been largely overcome. In an article at that time, we called this decision “nothing but a punch in the face to black people” (“Supreme Court Spits on Black Rights,” WV No. 1027, 12 July 2013). The Fifteenth Amendment granting voting rights regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” was ratified in 1870. But following the defeat of Reconstruction, it became a dead letter in the states of the old Confederacy, which employed poll taxes, literacy tests and other dirty tricks—backed up by the lynch rope terror of the Ku Klux Klan and local police (often intertwined)—to keep black people from casting ballots. The assaults on black voting rights today are the latest incarnation of this old song.

Since the 2013 Supreme Court ruling, Texas, along with other former Confederate states, has been spearheading a campaign to restrict voting rights. The state’s early attempts at crafting a voter photo ID law were so blatantly discriminatory against black people and Latinos that a 2016 federal appellate court ruling required the state to soften it. A similar law in North Carolina was struck down in 2016 because it targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision,” in the words of the judge’s decision. In 2017, the Supreme Court refused to reinstate the North Carolina law. Texas, however, kept on tweaking its restrictions and was finally rewarded on April 27, when a Fifth Circuit panel upheld the newest version.

In this era of mass incarceration, the disenfranchisement of convicted felons is a transparent device for blocking large numbers of black people and Latinos from exercising basic democratic rights. Some 6 million Americans have lost the right to vote due to felony convictions. A 2015 study reported that 2.2 million black adult U.S. citizens were prohibited from voting; nationally, more than one in eight voting-aged black men were ineligible to cast a ballot in the 2014 elections.

The assault on the right to vote has mainly been carried out by Republican governors and legislators in the name of preventing “voter fraud” and safeguarding election “integrity.” For their part, Democratic politicians went along with laws restricting voting rights for felons, though in recent months a few Democrats have called for easing them—in mainly Republican states. As for voter ID laws, the Democratic Party’s opposition to these measures is centered on swing states, whose importance is highlighted by the upcoming midterm elections. The in-your-face racist bigotry of the Republicans allows the Democrats to take support from black people for granted, without having to actually do anything for them.

There is, of course, real voter fraud. On April 23, Tarrant County justice of the peace Russ Casey, a Texas Republican, pleaded guilty to rigging his own election by turning in fake signatures to secure a place on a March 6 primary ballot. While Mason is looking at five years behind bars and Ortega has been sentenced to eight, Casey’s penalty was five years of probation. And it’s not just Republicans—Texas Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson was just as good at rounding up dead people to cast ballots and stealing elections as the notorious Chicago machine of former mayor Richard J. Daley.

The ballot is a fundamental democratic right that we tenaciously defend, but fundamental change will not come through voting. It was not by the ballot that slavery met its demise. Union rights did not come from Congress. All the gains working and black people have made came through their seizing them from the racist rulers by mass struggles on the battlefields, in the factories and on the streets.

When black people are declared to have no rights that others are bound to respect, it paints a target on the back of every black man, woman and child in this country. A serious defense of those rights demands resolute struggle against the capitalist system and opposition to the political parties that uphold its rule. The fight for the rights of the oppressed contributes to the struggle of the working class for its own liberation from capitalist exploitation through socialist revolution.