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When Studs Terkel Spoke Truth To Power In A Sullen World -A Tribute From NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source”
Link to Christopher Lydon's Open Source program on the late "people's journalist" Studs Terkel
http://radioopensource.org/sound-of-studs-terkel/
By Si Lannon
It was probably Studs Terkel via a series of book reviews of his interviews trying to get a feel for the soul of the American from Sam Lowell that I first heard the expression “speaking truth to power.” Spoke that message to a sullen world then. Unfortunately since that time the world had not gotten less sullen. Nor has the need to speak truth to power dissipated since Studs passed from this mortal coil of a world that he did so much to give ear and eye to. The problem, the real problem is that we in America no longer produce that pied piper, that guy who will tell the tale the way it has to be told. Something about those gals and guys who waded through the Great Depression, saw firsthand in the closed South Side Chicago factories that something was desperately wrong with the way society operated and slogged through World War II and didn’t go face down in the post-war dead ass could war night spoke of grit and of a feeling that the gritty would not let you down when the deal went down. When Mister (Peabody, James Crow, Robber Baron you name it) called the bluff and you stood there naked and raw.
Fellow Chicagoan writer Nelson Algren (he of The Man With The Golden Arm and Walk On The Wild Side) put the kind of gals and guys Studs looked around for in gritty urban sinkhole lyrical form but Studs is the guy who found the gritty unwashed masses to sing of. (It is not surprising that when Algren went into decline, wrote less lucid prose Stud grabbed him by the lapels and did a big time boost on one of his endless radio talks to let a candid world know that they missing a guy who know how to give voice to the voiceless, the people with small voices who are still getting the raw end of the deal, getting fucked over if you really want to nitty-gritty truth to power). So check this show out to see what it was like when writers and journalists went down in the mud to get to the spine of society.
Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel’s Web Page. Book Review “The Good War”: An Oral History Of World War II, Studs Terkel, Pantheon Books, 1984 Strangely, as I found out about the recent death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in America and elsewhere, for review in this space. A little comment is thus in order here before I do so. The obvious one that comes to mind is that with his passing he joins many of the icons of my youth who have now passed from the scene. Saul Bellows, Arthur Miller, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Utah Phillips to name a few. Terkel was certainly one of them, not for his rather bland old New Deal political perspective as much as a working class partisan as he might have been, but for his reportage about ordinary working people. These are my kind of people. This where I come from. He heard the particular musical cadence of their lives and wrote with some verve on the subject, especially that melody of his adopted Chicago home (Musically, Robert Johnson's "Sweet Home, Chicago" fits the bill here, right?). One thing that I noticed immediately after reading this book is that, as is true of the majority of Terkel's interview books, he is not the dominant presence but is a rather light, if intensely interested, interloper in these stories. For better or worse the interviewees get to tell their stories, unchained. In this age of 24/7 media coverage with every half-baked journalist or wannabe interjecting his or her personality into somebody else's story this was, and is, rather refreshing. Of course this journalistic virtue does not mean that Studs did not have control over who got to tell their stories and who didn't to fit his preoccupations and sense of order. I would have been surprised, for example, if the central leadership of the Allied military efforts, like General Eisenhower, got a lot of ink here but I was not surprised that, for example, the late "premature anti-fascist" Milton Wolff, the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, got a full airing on his interesting World War II exploits. What were Stud's preoccupations in this book? Obviously from the quotation marks around the title "The Good War" there is some question in his mind and in that of at least some of his interviewees that this now storied period was all that it was cracked up to be. One, however, gets the distinct impression that, notwithstanding that assumption, those who participated in this period, called the "greatest generation" at least in America basically saw it as a necessary war to fight, whatever else happened afterward. I have my disagreements with the premise that was this was the greatest American generation (the Northern side in the Civil War gets my vote) and what one should have done in response to the Axis threat to the world and the defense of the Soviet Union but I too will defer political judgment and let the participants tell their stories. And what stories are being told here? Well, certainly this book is filled with interviews of the lives, struggles and fate of the rank and file servicemen (and a few women) that fought that war. Those include the stories of soldiers from the Axis powers and the Soviet Union as well. Of course we have the trials and tribulations of those who were left behind on the home fronts, including those "Rosie The Riveters" women who went to work in the factories of America (and were later kicked out on the return of the men). Moreover, and this marks this book as different from earlier efforts to tell the war story, we have stories of the plight and successes of blacks, including the now famous Tuskegee Airmen, in this transitional racial period that in many ways is the catalyst for the later black civil rights movement of the 1950's. It is no accident that many of the early rank and file cadres of that movement were veterans of this war. As importantly we also have stories here of the effects the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war as told by those affected. Of course, no modern account of World War II can be complete without mention of the Holocaust (Shoah), the fates of the survivors and those who didn't as well as the impact that it had on the liberators on entering the death camps. Also necessary are the interviews concerning the grizzly fates of POW on all sides. As is, additionally, the general sense that many participants sincerely thought that this war was to be something like a war to end all wars (sound familiar?), especially in light of Hiroshima. I was somewhat surprised by the overwhelming distinction that was drawn between the "civilized" nature of the European war and the "savagery" of the Pacific war by the participants. However, I was not surprised by the general support for the dropping of the atomic bomb expressed by the bulk of the interviewees questioned nor was I surprised by the little tidbits of information about events that occurred during the war that presaged the buildup to the anti-Soviet Cold War. For those of us who are sons and daughters of this generation that fought the war, and who came of political age in the 1960's, this little book provides more personal information in one spot than I ever learned from my taciturn and reticent parents or from the high school history books. That, my friends, makes this any extremely necessary book for your lists if you came from an even later generation and are personally farther removed from this period. Read this book! Kudos and adieu Studs.
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- The MOVE Prisoners-Charles Simms Africa, Debbie Sims Africa, Delbert Orr Africa, Edward Goodman Africa, Janet Holloway Africa, Janine Phillips Africa, Michael Davis Africa
A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck [now deceased], whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania [former] death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long -time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class- war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases here. Likewise any cases, internationally that may come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Marie Jeanette Mason
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Zolo Azania http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010) In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom. That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all. Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck [now deceased], whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania [former] death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long -time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class- war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases here. Likewise any cases, internationally that may come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
On Bobby Kennedy- A Personal View From The Left On The Anniversary Of His Assassination
Commentary Every political movement has its ‘high holy days’, its icons and its days of remembrance. We on the international labor left have our labor day-May Day. We pay tribute each January to the work of Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. Some of us remember the assassination by Stalin of the revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Others celebrate November 7th the anniversary of the Russian revolution in 1917. The Democratic Party in the United States is no exception to those symbols of group solidarity. They have their Jefferson- Jackson dinners, their nomination conventions and their remembrances of their modern political heroes like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and so forth. It is somewhat ironic that at just the time that when presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, a recent addition to the Democratic Party pantheon of heroes and heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy, is claiming the nomination of the party that the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1968 is being remembered in some quarters. That event holds much meaning in the political evolution of this writer. The Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 was the last time that this writer had a serious desire to fight solely on the parliamentary road for political change. So today he too has some remembrances, as well. In the course of this year I have read (or rather re-read) and reviewed elsewhere the 1960, 1968 and 1972 presidential campaign writings of Norman Mailer and those of 1972 by Hunter Thompson. I have, additionally, written reminiscences of my own personal political evolution that point to 1968 as a watershed year personally and politically for those of us of the Generation of ’68. Just a quick thumbnail sketch of my own political trajectory that year will give the reader a flavor of the times. I committed myself early (sometime in late 1967) to the reelection of Lyndon Johnson, as much as I hated his Vietnam War policy. Why? One Richard M. Nixon. I did not give Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent campaign even a sniff, although I agreed with his anti-war stance. Why? He could not beat one Richard M. Nixon. When Booby jumped into the race and days later Johnson announced that he was not going to run again in I was there the next day. I was a senior in college at the time but I believe I spent hundreds of hours that spring working the campaign either out of Boston, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. Why? Well, you can guess the obvious by now. He COULD beat one Richard M. Nixon. It was more than that though, and I will mention more on that below. I took, as many did, his murder hard. It is rather facile now to say that something of my youth, and that of others who I have talked to recently about this event, got left behind with his murder but there you have it. However, to show you the kind of political year that it was for me about a week after his death I was in the Hubert Humphrey campaign office in Boston. Why? You know why by now. And for those who don’t it had one name- Richard M. Nixon. But let us get back to that other, more virtuous, political motive for supporting Bobby Kennedy. It was always, in those days, complicated coming from Massachusetts to separate out the whirlwind effect that the Kennedy family had on us, especially on ‘shanty’ Irish families. On the one hand we wished one of our own well, especially against the WASPs, on the other there was always that innate bitterness (jealousy, if you will) that it was not we who were the ones that were getting ahead. If there is any Irish in your family you know what I am talking about. To be sure, as a fourteen year old I walked the neighborhood for John Kennedy in 1960 but as I have mentioned elsewhere that was a pro forma thing. Part of the ritual of entry into presidential politics. The Bobby thing was from the heart. Why? It is hard to explain but there was something about the deeply felt sense of Irish fatalism that he projected, especially after the death of his brother, that attracted me to him. But also the ruthless side where he was willing to cut Mayor Daly and every politician like him down or pat them on the back and more, if necessary, to get a little rough justice in the world. In those days I held those qualities, especially in tandem, in high esteem. Hell, I still do, if on a narrower basis. This next comment will I hope put the whole thing in a nutshell. Recently I was listening to a program commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Robert Kennedy’s assassination on National Public Radio where one of the guests was the journalist and close Kennedy friend Pete Hamill. Hamill, who was in the Los Angeles hotel celebrating the decisive California primary victory when the assassination took place, mentioned that a number of people closely associated with Kennedy at that time saw history passing through their hands in a flash. By that they meant, sincerely I am sure, that the last best change to beat Nixon and hold off the "Night of the Long Knives" had passed. Well, if nothing else they were right in one sense and here is where one including this writer, as politically distance from Kennedy’s party as I am today, could appreciate the political wisdom of Robert Kennedy. In his incisive way Kennedy cut to the chase and through all the political baloney when he said that Richard Nixon represented the dark side of the American spirit. True words, I would only add these words-the dark spirit that the world has rightly come to fear and loathe. Forty years later and one hundred years politically wiser I can still say though - Bobby Kennedy, oh what might have been.
A View From The Left-An Appreciation of Chuck Berry
Workers Vanguard No. 1112
19 May 2017
An Appreciation of Chuck Berry
(Letter)
23 April 2017
To Workers Vanguard,
Chuck Berry (1926-2017) was very nearly the last of the black pioneers of rock’n roll from the 1940s and 50s including Little Richard, Ike Turner, Howlin Wolf and more, who lived, performed and innovated from the time of Jim Crow segregation and lynch law until well into the 21st Century. Chuck’s parents and grandparents on both sides knew their slave-born ancestors and passed on to him their names, relationships and stories.
Like others before him, Chuck bucked his Baptist parents’ opposition to play “the devil’s music”. Consigned to the category of “race music”, he and his fellow rockers were exploited by promoters and recording companies, cheated of the rights to their songs, and later saw their songs covered with far greater commercial success by admiring white American performers and British invaders (Roll Over Beethoven, Sweet Little Sixteen). John Lennon was quoted as saying, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’”
Unable to make a living from their recordings, these musicians toured at an exhausting pace, staying in segregated accommodations and playing to segregated audiences. Where there were no hotels for blacks, they slept in their cars and ducked the police. They were virulently hated by politicians and law enforcement when white kids, especially white girls, began to literally dance across the color line, touching the explosive intersection of sex and race under capitalism. From Billie Holiday to Ray Charles, black musicians were targeted for beatings, confiscation of earnings, arrest and imprisonment, typically for sex, drugs and taxes. Chuck was hounded under the Mann Act, once for travelling with a married 17-year old and once with a teen prostitute. He was imprisoned for tax evasion (i.e., failure to set aside money to pay outrageously regressive self-employment taxes).
Chuck built on previous musical advances, including those of Johnny Johnson, T-Bone Walker and Bob Wills, melding blues and country swing with his own style. He was a vivid story teller of the poor man’s experience (Nadine, No Money Down, Memphis Tennessee). He combined his slyly provocative lyrics, signature duck walk and a hard-driving rhythm, “the backbeat, you can’t lose it”. He made the crossover to biracial and teenage audiences, shedding his exploitive managers, signing with Chess Records, and getting a grip on the rights to his songs.
Chuck was prominent among the musicians who boldly broke the color line in performance venues. He was unapologetic, and an icon for the 1960s generation who rebelled against the strictures of family and religion, imperialist war and racial oppression. The Freedom Riders, those who sat in at lunch counters, those who marched against the Vietnam War grew up on his music, knew his songs and his story. The life and hard times of Chuck Berry exemplified the fact that there is no original American music or culture without black music and culture. Beating all odds, Chuck Berry died in bed at his home at the age of 90.
Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one of them, I can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.
Workers Vanguard No. 1112
19 May 2017
Arkansas Legal Lynching Machine
Abolish the Racist U.S. Death Penalty!
In just eight days—from April 20 to 27—the state of Arkansas executed three black men, Ledell Lee, Marcel Williams and Kenneth Williams, and one white man, Jack Jones. Governor Asa Hutchinson had originally ordered eight men to die in the span of eleven days, which would have set a record pace since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. The four men who received stays of execution remain on death row. The pretext for the executions was to beat the clock on the April 30 expiration of midazolam, a component of the lethal injection cocktail for which no alternative is readily available. The real point, however, was to kick-start the machinery of death in a state that had last held an execution in 2005.
The assembly line of death in Arkansas has thrown a spotlight on the depravity of capital punishment—and the racist U.S. ruling class that wields it. Witnesses to Kenneth Williams’s execution reported that after injection he lurched forward as many as 20 times; he was observed convulsing, jerking and making sounds that were audible in an adjacent room. The scene recalled the 2014 Oklahoma execution of Clayton Lockett, who writhed in agony for over 40 minutes before succumbing.
Ledell Lee’s 1993 conviction for the murder of a white woman had all the hallmarks of a racist frame-up. From a crime scene covered in blood, the only physical evidence linking Lee to the murder was the phony “forensic” identification of three hairs that supposedly came from a black man. The trial judge and the assistant prosecutor were sleeping together. Lee’s court-appointed trial attorney presented no alibi, and the attorney at his post-conviction hearing was so drunk, he was taken away for drug testing. From death row Lee told a BBC journalist: “My dying words will always be as it has been ‘I am an innocent man’.” The Innocence Project and the ACLU fought to get DNA testing of the crime scene’s physical evidence. The state refused. Ledell Lee is no more.
Joining an April 14 protest outside the Arkansas Capitol was Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three, who served his own time on Arkansas’s death row. Targeted in a “satanic abuse” witchhunt, Echols and his friends were falsely convicted for the 1993 murder of three eight-year-old boys. Echols won his release in 2011 following a huge campaign in his defense, including DNA evidence that confirmed his innocence. On the day of Lee’s execution Echols pointed out: “Local politicians maintain they have never made a mistake, that the system is infallible, and that they have never sentenced an innocent man to die. I know this is false, because for 18 years I sat on Arkansas’ death row and waited on the state to murder me for something I didn’t do.”
As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies. A barbaric legacy of medieval torture, its longevity in the United States is rooted in the origins of American capitalism, which was built on the hideously brutalized labor of black slaves. More than 40 percent of those on death row are black (and another 13 percent Latino). As opposed to the liberals, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on the more “humane” administration of its decrepit rule. Whether it is the death penalty, life in prison without parole or imprisonment in general, we oppose the entire machinery of violence that is the capitalist state.
Nearly 250,000 signed a petition urging Arkansas governor Hutchinson to stay Kenneth Williams’s execution. Though a majority of the public still favor the death penalty, support has diminished significantly over the past two decades—a product of the growing number of exonerations of innocent men and women, often the result of DNA testing of evidence. Finding jurors more reluctant to impose capital punishment and frustrated at what they view as the slow pace of executions, prosecutors, lawmakers and judges have calculated life without parole to be cheaper than the millions of dollars consumed by capital prosecutions and years of appeals. Today, the Trump administration, as part of a broader enhancement of the repressive powers of the state, is seeking to reverse this trend.
Donald Trump rode to the presidency on a “law and order” platform targeting black people and immigrants. An ardent proponent of the death penalty, Trump has called for the execution of “pedophiles.” His openly racist attorney general, Jefferson Sessions, has called for lifting formal restraints on the cops, re-igniting the “war on drugs,” which promises to throw more black and Latino youth into America’s dungeons, and ordered federal prosecutors to seek the maximum sentences for those facing trial.
The first act of Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, was to cast the decisive vote against a stay of execution for the men facing execution in Arkansas. Meanwhile, a Republican state senator in Arkansas is calling for the impeachment of a black judge, Wendell Griffen, who issued a temporary restraining order to block the April executions and then took part in an anti-death-penalty vigil outside the governor’s mansion on Good Friday. Similarly in Florida, Governor Rick Scott promptly removed all death penalty cases from Aramis Ayala, a black female state’s attorney for the Orlando area, who announced on March 16 that she would not seek the death penalty, including for a man accused of killing a policewoman. After announcing her opposition to the death penalty, Ayala received a noose in the mail.
For its part, the capitalist Democratic Party is no less committed to the death penalty than the brazenly racist Republicans. Under the Obama administration, the number of federal prisoners on death row increased, while the cops wantonly carried out summary executions of black people on the streets.
In Arkansas itself, there were no executions between 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment, and 1990, when legal lynching was reintroduced to the state by William Jefferson Clinton. Since then, 30 men and one woman have been executed in the state. During his run for president in 1992, Clinton left the campaign trail to personally preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man so brain-damaged from a gunshot to the head that he wanted to save the pecan pie from his last meal for later. Clinton’s “dog whistle” to racist white voters propelled him into the White House, where he ended “welfare as we know it” and presided over the gutting of affirmative action in education and the mass incarceration of black and Latino youth. As president, he accelerated the racist death penalty with his 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which gutted habeas corpus appeals for death row inmates—a model for state laws across the country intended to streamline the road from courthouse to death house.
A Legacy of Slavery
The death penalty stands at the pinnacle of the state’s arsenal of repression—an apparatus consisting of the army, cops, courts and prisons that protects the class rule, property and profits of the capitalist class. While the face of death row is now primarily black and Latino, fighters for labor’s cause have also been targeted for death by the capitalist state: the Haymarket anarchists, labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour day and were put to death in 1877; IWW organizer Joe Hill, executed in 1915; anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, who died in the electric chair in 1927.
While nearly every other advanced industrialized capitalist country has abolished capital punishment (with the notable exception of Japan), its persistence in the U.S. is a legacy of black chattel slavery and the continued oppression of black people. The 20 executions carried out last year, and the ten thus far this year, took place in just seven states. All of them were in the South and most in the former Confederacy, where slaves could be killed with impunity for “crimes” ranging from insolence toward whites to rebellion against the slave masters.
It took a bloody Civil War to smash slavery. But the promise of black freedom was betrayed when the Northern capitalists ended the period of Radical Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops, leaving black people impoverished and largely defenseless. With the Ku Klux Klan and other race-terrorist outfits as the spearhead, the white propertied classes subjected black people to legally enforced racial segregation, stripped them of all democratic rights and held them down through terror, especially lynching. The black population was consolidated anew—and remains to this day—as a specially oppressed race-color caste.
Capital punishment in America is a direct descendent of and replacement for the lynch rope. In the 1890s, black people were lynched at a rate of one every other day; in the 1930s, executions took place at the rate of one every other day. A 2015 study by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative noted, “By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time.” In the period between 1910 and 1950, black people made up 75 percent of those executed across the country.
In 1967, amid the mass struggles of the civil rights movement, a de facto moratorium on capital punishment was temporarily imposed. In 1972 the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional as practiced and ordered states to rewrite their laws. A mere four years later, the Court gave the green light for the killing machines to resume their grisly work. Eighty-one percent of the 1,452 executions in the last 40 years have been in the South.
The racist application of the death penalty was sanctified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Warren McCleskey, a black prisoner executed in Georgia in 1991. McCleskey’s attorneys presented an authoritative study detailing that black people in Georgia convicted of killing whites were sentenced to death 22 times more frequently than those convicted of killing blacks. In rejecting McCleskey’s appeal, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged that to accept this premise would throw “into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.” In its callous pronouncement, the Court expressed a basic truth: McCleskey was a victim of the racism that pervades the criminal justice system and the entire American capitalist order.
For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!
Little expresses the cruelty of capital punishment better in the U.S. than the legislative and judicial contortions to give state murder a humane gloss. The adoption of lethal injection, beginning in the early 1980s, was promoted as a supposedly more humane way of killing prisoners than electrocution. In fact, lethal injection was implemented by Nazi Germany as part of its Aktion T4 “euthanasia” program to dispose of lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).
In 2007, the Supreme Court prohibited the execution of a psychotic person unless the prisoner was lucid enough to have a “rational understanding” of the punishment he was about to receive. This is what the courts refer to as “evolving standards of decency.” When capital punishment was reintroduced in the U.S. amid anti-crime hysteria, we noted in “Abolish the Death Penalty!” (WV No. 117, 9 July 1976): “The Marxist attitude toward crime and punishment is that we are against it.... Socialists do not proceed from the standpoint of punishing the offender. Such a vindictive penal attitude is fundamentally a religious rather than a materialist conception of social relations.” Indeed, a humane and rational society may find a need to isolate certain dangerous individuals. This would be done without stigma or cruelty, and with education, medical care, rehabilitation and the goal of reintegration as a productive member of society. This was the approach of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky that led the October 1917 Russian socialist revolution.
As Marxists, we fight for the abolition of the death penalty. But we also understand that ending capital punishment will not fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive nature of capitalist class rule. Our aim is to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War by fighting for black liberation through socialist revolution. What is necessary is the forging of a class-struggle workers party with a significant black leadership component. Such a party will be built in opposition to both parties of capital and will be dedicated to mobilizing the social power of labor in defense of the interests of all working people and the oppressed. When those who labor rule, the entire apparatus of capitalist state repression will be smashed as part of sweeping away this barbaric system and opening the door to an egalitarian socialist future.
He Gave It All Away-With Tom Paxton’s Song “She Is My Reason To Be” In Mind
By Freeman Steel
He had it all. Jeffrey Davis had it all although until he lost it, until he gave it away, he did not realize that he had had it all. By the way for the curious who thing that they recognize the named party to this piece Jeffrey Davis is not the real name of our protagonist but like the Jeffrey Davis that you do think you know from his various screen exploits our Jeffrey Davis has his own similar reasons for using an alias here. Part of the reason is that he although not connected in any way with the screen, with movies or television is well-known in the literary field for his work and works of criticism. Part of the reason to be completely candid is that he was not sure that the statute of limitations might not have run out of various small crimes and legal evasions in his past so that publishing his real name might not bring to notice in the circles that he formerly ran in to haul his ass into court, especially the ex-wives he left high and dry. And part of the reason was that he just plain asked me as a long-time friend (and one time victim of his youthful cons) to not use his name as a test of my loyalty after all these years if I wanted the story. I did and so Jeffrey Davis it is.
But enough of subterfuges and diversions around identity confidentiality and on to the reason why our boy, my old corner boy from, well, I had better not say from when, what times or where since his beginnings are well known to part of the public and that would defeat his purpose in forcing me at virtual reality gunpoint to guard like a sacred temple his real name, had lost what he had, had given it all away. Jeffrey Davis’ wife, Lorraine Daley not her real name either since if you knew that name you, you the literary sort would figure out who that old corner boy from wherever he was from back in the day was and I would be out a “think piece” story about the pitfalls of statutory neglect (not a crime, a legal crime anyway, and not the reason that Jeffrey was worried about statute of limitation run outs), had recently left Jeffrey high and dry. Had left him for her own reasons mostly according to Jeffrey’s frail understandings in the matter to “find” herself whatever that might have meant to her.
Left in the middle of the night one night a few months back bag and baggage as they use to say around the old neighborhood when some married partner high-tailed it out of town with no explanation (in those unenlightened days either male leaving female or female leaving male but not one leaving one of the same gender just so you know we are talking about it has been a while back since that phrase had fresh currency). NO public explanation but it did not take much to figure out that some stay married forever woman had had enough of the abuse, physical and mental, from some bastard of a drunken husband (and father which is how we began to figure such abnormal leavings, abnormal for the old neighborhood), or that some husband had done the high-tailing with some barroom floozy. In any case Lorraine left and left no forwarding address-none. Had discontinued her previous cellphone and presumably gotten a new one although Jeffrey speculated that in the process of “finding” herself Lorraine may have decided to forgo the modern conveniences if she had wound up in some ashram as she had talked about, had threatened to do in previous versions of the downward slide of their relationship.
Despite the several month time lapse Jeff had not really reconciled himself as to what had caused him to forget that he had had it all with Lorraine, had given it all away. Then one night he called me on his cellphone, called me Sid Lawrence if I have not introduced myself before and looking over the previous paragraphs it appears that I have not although the important information, Jeff and my connection for the old neighborhood I did give you and wanted me to come over to his house in, well it is a big city so I can say it and he will proof this piece anyway, Los Angeles, over in the hills and canyons and sit with him while he tried to tell me how he had by his own freaking hand, his term, lost it all. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear what he had to say but in the interest of old corner boy friendship I agreed.
We met at his well-appointed bungalow a few nights later and after a couple of stiff belts of well-preserved scotch he sat me down in one of his comfortable (and expensive) easy chairs and sat himself down on his long couch to speak about what ailed him about what was on his mind. Jeff whatever his literary skills, whatever line of pure, unmitigated bullshit he could throw at male or female, but mostly female and whatever the gods had granted him in the wisdom department was not a reflective man, did not dwell on the past, conveniently forgot the past (as in the big time con for several thousand hard-luck earned dollars he ran by me back in the days when for what he called “literary” purposes he ran tens of thousands of somebody else’s dollars up his snowman nose) and lived in the moment. I could tell though by his demeanor (and his willingness to sit me down after only two stiff scotches) that he had been thinking about some past stuff, about his character which was so explosive, so unstable at times that giving it all away in the past was coming back to haunt his dreams-or his desires.
When he began talking about Annie Dubois, his first real love, his, well, I had better not mentioned marriages and leave everything as affairs so the smart reader will not figure out who Jeff really is and we would have wasted good time and cyberspace creating a ruse, I knew he been in a sullen introspective mood. That sullen part no literary device on my part Jeff really did get sullen which showed up remarkably clearly on his face when he had to think through some ramification of some off-the-wall thing he had done. He just hid that trait these days better in public than when I first noticed his reaction back in sophomore year in high school.
What I know is that he had not mentioned her name in front of me for years, hell, decades so I knew that sullen look was real. I should mentioned here before I tell you how Jeff related his feelings about how he had loved and lost that young woman, had given it all away, that I was half, maybe more, in love with her myself, had seen her first at a college mixer but she after looking me over on a few dates had decided that my roommate Jeff was more to her liking (they called them the now rightly taboo “smokers” in those days for some unknown to me reason but probably because since everybody was hopped up to find some companion the air was filled with anxious smoke, anxious Marlboro, Salem, Newport, Winston smoke). So I was not disappointed those many years when he did not mention her name. That night my heart raced at the mention of her name just like it had when I was some smitten schoolboy. Damn, Jeff.
I never, because I did not want to know and you can understand why now, knew the details of the break-up between Jeff and Annie. Painfully I listened as Jeff went through the litany. He and Annie stuck like glue together all through college. They essentially lived together for much of that time after freshman year in an apartment in Cambridge (not the real location but close-what I do for Jeff in the interest of a story) during the school year and at various seaside resorts in the summer. A classic 1960s romance with the sword of Damocles hanging over it. That sword –the raging crazy and unjust Vietnam War that we were all very aware of, we males anyway, since its’ seemingly endless travails put despite huge and growing protests and calls from even many governmental quarters to stop the damn thing placed us all at risk of being drafted. Eventually as the reader can probably figure out by now Jeff’s number came up with no further student exemption and no serious reason not to accept induction he allowed himself to be drafted. That “allowed” his term later for what had happened to him. (Although he and Annie were prominent anti-war rally attendees he did not consider himself under the rules for such status and under his Catholic upbringing a conscientious objector and under no circumstances was he going to jail or to Canada the other options that faced almost every young male then. I was 4-F, unfit for military duty, because of a crippling knee accident as a kid and the Army may overlook lots of disabilities but they want their charges to be able to march- and march great distances- as necessary)
Once he got his draft notice Jeff began to panic. Started worrying about things like never having been married if he was killed in Vietnam. Not having any family to mourn him (he had been estranged from his parents for many years, had lived with his grandmother who just before senior year had passed away). Stuff like that that if the times were different he would have not given a fuck about, my term. So he and Annie tied the knot, got married. A bad move, a “war-time marriage” bad move that they could have seen coming if they had watched just a few old time movies like I did although even that might not have helped.
He eventually like some horrible nightmare coming to pass as things developed against him was trained as an infantryman, the only thing in the late 1960s the Army cared about training since the attrition rate with one year deployments in Vietnam was eating up personnel at a fast clip. And at just that time the only place in the great wide world that a U.S. infantryman was heading for was that hell hole Vietnam. So after his training and month’s leave Jeff had orders issued to him report to Fort Lewis in the state of Washington for transfer to Vietnam. He panicked, or maybe if not panicked then reverted back to his corner boy ways-or part of the corner boy ethos-lie like a bastard and hope things worked out
After his leave was up he suddenly told Annie that he had through political connections had had his orders changed and he was to report to Fort Dix in New Jersey where he was to be discharged under some administrative regulation so that he could go work on the staff of a Congressman in Washington, D.C. Annie was elated (and relieved) by the news and ready to run to D.C. with him for their new future. The whole scenario seemed very reasonable since Jeff had worked like seven dervishes for the late Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and even as he was telling me this over forty years later I could see where if he had told me the same story then I would have bought it hook, line and sinker.
The problem though, and I would have been harassed like crazy for believing one word of the story back in corner boy days when he (and we) thought nothing of lying about everything from having sex with hot girls to how much we paid for a shirt (usually nothing since we stole stuff like that), it was all bullshit. He had just unilaterally taken himself AWOL for that whole time, the whole few months. The way the whole thing exploded was that the FBI had come to Annie’s parents’ house (he had used their address with their permission on his Army information file) looking for him, AWOL him. He did turn himself in and faced the music. That however was the last straw for Annie and her parents. Especially Annie since as it turned out he had done a number of unsavory or illegal things unknown then to me during their courtship. She left him to go back to her parents’ home. Eventually Annie got a civil divorce and as a Catholic member of a church who at the time, maybe now too, had very strict rules about remarriage after a divorce finally got a church annulment from Jeff. As for Jeff he on his return to the Army did the honorable thing and refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in the stockade for his efforts. But the details of that story are for his next serious giving it all away and besides this is about his first serious love life, his giving it all away when the deal went down. Typical Jeff though a heel one day a hero the next.
As Jeff started to explain why he had never forgotten about Annie I urged him to change the subject and something in my tone told him that I meant it, meant that I too had not forgotten Annie and what she had meant to me back then. So he went on about his thunder-struck whirlwind relationship with Josie, Josie Stein, a woman who I had never met because I had stayed on the West Coast while Jeff after a wild man run with me and a few others from the old neighborhood at various times there returned to the East. Josie would be the first, and most serious, of a string of young Jewish women that would checkerboard through his later relationships. Fine women who he never fully understood either. This meeting up with Josie had come about because like half of the things that Jeff did in his life he was on a vengeance roll to obliterate all the stupid things he had done by letting himself be inducted in the Army.
As I mentioned before after blowing up the world, the Annie world, with his fears Jeff when he went back into the Army made up his mind not to go to Vietnam, not to be complicit. He paid the price with two special court-martials for disobeying orders and did altogether something over a year in an Army stockade (partly broken up by what amounted to house arrest in between times). He wound up though getting out of the Army with an honorable discharge to boot as a conscientious objector through a writ of habeas corpus which his civilian lawyer had managed to convince a federal court judge was due him. As part of his struggle, his righteous struggle okay, a number of anti-war activists and Quaker-types came to his defense, publicized what he was doing and held vigils and other events in and around the Army base where he was being held. This was a time when some elements of the anti-war movement began, after the war was dragging out to what seemed like eternity, to pay attention to the soldiers, the “grunts” who were carrying out the war on the ground. So Jeff became for a while before he and I left for California and some mad but harmless dope-enhanced adventures up and down the Pacific Coast Highway something of a poster child for the local anti-war G.I. resistance. Some of that reputation would stick for a while as the war finally wound down.
Josie had been born in Manhattan but had gone in order to get away from the city, her parents, her Jewish roots you name the reason to the University of Wisconsin which the way Jeff told it was a magnet for New York City and Long Island Jewish kids looking to break out back then, maybe now too. While there she had become radicalized, had become somewhat prominent in the campus anti-war, anti-imperialist and the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement. After graduating from Wisconsin she had decided to go to graduate school in Boston (at BU for the School of Social Work). While in Boston she again took up her political causes in the red-hot milieu there. Jeff had met her a couple of months after he had returned East at an anti-war conference, no, I have that wrong, at a meeting to discuss having another in the long line of anti-war conferences. This one to take place in a rural conference center which had been converted from being a farmhouse about fifty miles from Boston and had donated by some movement “angels” for such purposes. Such things happened with some frequency then.
When Jeff was introduced to speak about his G.I resistance experiences he spied Josie in the audience. During a break he, she, maybe both at the same time Jeff had forgotten that detail took dead aim at each other (that part he remembered) although nothing occurred that night. Their big moment came when both had showed up at the rural site for the conference and they were almost inseparable for the rest of the weekend. So started the torrid off and on again five year love affair between Jeff and Josie. According to Jeff they had their ups and downs, mostly toward the end downs over Josie’s increasingly incessant desire to settle down, to have a family, to be “at peace” with herself as the turbulent ‘60s shuttered down around them. Jeff in an uncharacteristic denial of some kind of realty thought that the whole experiment would go on forever and he could ride that wave into old age.
Funny about that, funny that he would still remember that he had felt that way those many years ago since I remember that we had both distinctly understood that after May Day, 1971 when we foolhardily thought we could close down the U.S. government if they would not close down the war and had been militarily defeated, had taken tens of thousands of arrests, we had reached an ebb tide of the movement, had passed the high water mark.
That however was not what laid the relationship between Jeff and Josie low but yet another of the contradictions of the angel-devil Jeffrey Davis. Jeff, and I could see where this came from since I had thoughts along those lines a little myself, had a hard-edged chip on his shoulder, thought that because he (and I) had come up “from hunger,” from utter poverty, from the old projects ethos that the world owed him a living, or something like that. I got over it by high school, maybe a little later but Jeff took much longer, maybe still hasn’t gotten over it even now but if you want to understand why he periodically would give it all away you have to know that hard sad fact. The particulars this time were that he had gotten seriously into dope, first speed and mescaline and later as it became more popular and more available cocaine. Now we all did our fair share of dope during the 1960s, usually marijuana and other light-headed drugs like hashish and peyote buttons. This cocaine thing though was something else, had Jeff by the balls. Had laid him low. This is where all his past kind of came up and bit him. He couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. Kept it from Josie mostly although at the end she asked him point blank if he was on heroin or something. Of course a young guy with no dough, or not much, not working much with a habit that called out to him needed dough. So he ran though everybody, everybody including leaving me high and dry out on the Coast broke as well, who he knew for dough using every lame excuse in the book to get the dough-and of course would pay it back just as soon as he could.
He didn’t hit Josie until the end, or near the end. That was when he was seeing some hopped-up Judy on the side who kept him company in his wanting habits. Once he started asking Josie for money for this and that after a while she started getting wise, found out about the Judy from some friend and that was that. She broke off with him in a minute once she knew the score (prodded he said by her parents who were not happy that she was serious about a non-Jewish guy). She got an unlisted number, moved from their sometimes shared apartment which she paid for, or rather her parents paid for. The end. Gave it all away for a razor, mirror and a rolled up dollar line.
Which brings us back to Lorraine and Jeff’s newly discovered troubled mind and why he gave it all away once again when she left to find herself. Or whatever had driven her away from him. After a number of years out in the West Coast trying to “find” myself I finally headed back to the East, back to Boston via Riverdale after my last stormy marriage that ended not well. Not well enough that despite being broken as a smashed soda bottle, splintered if you like that better, I desperately hitchhiked across the country to get away from that last horrible scene (which was partly, a big partly, due to my own “from hunger” thinking that the world owed me a living from getting deeply in debt to the gambling gods). But enough of that this is Jeff’s story and my travails can wait another day. I just wanted to point that out since this return to the East meant that I was back in touch after several year’s absence with Jeff which was deep in the throes of his stormy relationship with Lorraine. So unlike Josie whom I had to take Jeff’s word on I knew Lorraine although unlike Annie of blessed memory I had no half in love thoughts about her.
Jeff quickly went through how he had met Lorraine since I knew most of the details of the story. He had been half in and half out of a bunch of relationships which had not worked out for several Jeff reasons when one night he happened to be in a bar in Harvard Square, a country bar if you can believe that, when there had been outlaw country music minute around the East after people tired once again of the way rock was heading. That “if you can believe that” reflecting the hard fact that Jeff, whose father hailed from the South, having been inundated with that stuff around the house hated that music with a passion growing up. One night by accident he had heard the late Townes Van Zandt at a local club and something in his mournful lyrics and presence “spoke” to Jeff. So for a while he was hopped up on the outlaws, took in the scene. You know it had to be some kind of fad if in high Brahmin Harvard Square a couple of country music bars had sprung up and so he headed to one of them, Jackie Speed’s, it is no longer there, to hear some local country band which was making some noise about breaking out and heading to the bright lights of Nashville and stardom. He sat at the bar as was his habit when he was “single” in order to survey the scene and maybe an hour in and a couple of Anchor Steam beers put away, a beer we had both developed a habit for in Frisco town, he spied Lorraine all in white sitting at a far corner table with a couple of girlfriends. When one of those girls came pass the bar he mentioned to her that he thought her friend in white was cute, pretty, something like that and to tell her his message. And she was. A delicate flower, thin, longest black hair and a nice smile that he could see even across the room. His type no question. That girlfriend not knowing what else to say told him to go over and tell her himself. For some reason Jeff usually only a little shy about meeting a young women for the first time definitely did not like to approach a table full of women to make his play. His play was one on one, in a barroom scene maybe sitting on a stool at the bar. While they took peep-a-boo meaningful glances at each other nothing happened that night.
A few weeks later Jeff was sitting at that same bar one night getting ready to listen to what somebody had told him previously was the “next best thing” band coming along the pipeline to break-out Nashville this young woman who he had not recognized came and sat down at the stool next to his and ordered a drink, an exotic one if he remembered correctly. She was thin, pretty, had longish black hair and a nice smile. When it came time for her to order another one Jeff offered to buy her a drink. She accepted and that kind of broke the ice as they found that they had several interests in common around art, literature and folk music which was in a serious hiatus then and the reason that she, Lorraine, was taking in the insurgent country scene that was beginning to take root around town. She had been brought up in the country, on a farm in upstate New York so she had heard country music, a different old-timey Grand Old Opry kind of music, and also hated it growing up. Toward the end of evening as they were chatting like two jaybirds Lorraine asked Jeff if had ever seen her before. He said no he did not think so. Lorraine then reminded him of the night several weeks before when they had done their peek-a-boos. She also told him that she had looked for him a couple of times later when she had been at the bar. Funny Jeff said he had done the same. Fate and an exchange of telephones numbers got them on the start of their torrid romance.
For a while, a fairly long while by Jeff’s standards things went along pretty well. They had plenty in common not only in the like to do things department but a commonality in the ways they grew up, the hard family lives they had faced as kids. Especially around holidays when under normal circumstances there was to be a shared joy they shared a “get through the day” kinship. Like a lot of Jeff things though known to me or not something in his inner life, something in his vacant soul, his term, would not leave him alone. Would not let him break from his youthful defensiveness inherited from years of mother harassment and ill-will when dealing with Lorraine. In the end, or rather toward the end, the last few years anyway for a whole assortment of reasons from health to intimations of immortality to use the phrase from the poet’s brain he shut down, became unresponsive to Lorraine’s needs. They lived together but were in his words two ships passing in the night (and hers as well as they tried to figure out what had gone wrong before she had had to flee for her own sanity). Both tried to do the right thing, sought various forms of help but in the end she had to flee, had to find herself and what she wanted to be in this wicked old world. Jeff didn’t like the idea, actually hated it but he grudgingly respected her for her bravery in striking out on her own. Had to admit that rather than his lying, cheating, stealing destruction of his companionships he could be accused of statutory neglect-a more serious social crime, much more serious.
One night many weeks later after I had written up this piece from the notes I had taken over the course of time we were sitting in Jimmy’s Grille, symbolically enough only a couple of blocks from where Jeff and Lorraine had met at the now defunct Jackie Speed’s, when he was feeling kind of melancholy since her birthday was approaching, something they both made a big deal over he mentioned a song he had heard recently. A song by the old-time folksinger Tom Paxton whom he had liked to hear in the old folk minute days and whom the local college folk station was playing to honor his birthday (forget his age), She Is My Reason To Be. Yeah, too late Jeff figured that hard truth out. But maybe he should have also checked out Bob Dylan’s I Threw It All Away because once again he had thrown it all away.
The Magnificent Seven- Potshot-A Spenser Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review
Book Review
By Sam Lowell
Potshot, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2001
Of late I have been on something of a Spenser crime detection novel run, you know those sagas of the Boston-based P.I. with the big burly physique and the no nonsense grit and determination to see a case through to the end, the bitter end if necessary, written by the late Robert B. Parker. I started out several reviews of those books by explaining that most of the year when I review books I review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. I also said that come summer time you never know will turn up on your summer reading list and why. So blame this run on the summer heat if you must. I confessed that like any other heated, roasted urban dweller I was looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Then I went into genesis about how I wound up running the rack, or part of the rack, after all there were some forty Spenser books in the series before Parker passed away in 2010. I will get to the review of his 2001 effort Potshot in a minute after I explain how I came to read for crying out loud yet another Parker crime novel.
See, as I have mentioned elsewhere of late in reviewing some of the other Parker-etched books every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little classic crime detection from the max daddy masters of the genre Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett from my library to see the real deal, to see how the masters worked their magic, in order to spruce up (and parse, if possible) my own writing. This past summer when I did so I noticed a book Poodle Spring by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. This final Philip Marlowe series book was never finished by Chandler before he died in 1959. Parker finished it up in 1989.
Robert B. Parker, of course, had been a name known to me as the crime novel writer of the Spenser series of which I had read several of the earlier ones before moving on to others interests. That loss of interest centered on the increasingly formulistic way Parker packaged the Spenser character with his chalk board scratching to my mind repetition of his eating habits, his culinary likes and dislikes, his off-hand racial solidarity banter with his black compadre Hawk, his continually touting Spenser’s physical and mental “street cred” toughness and his so-called monogamous and almost teenage-like love affair with his flame, Susan. They collectively did not grow as characters but became stick figures serving increasingly less interesting plots.
Checking up on what Parker had subsequently written in the series to see if I had been rash in my judgment I noticed and grabbed another Chandler-Parker collaboration or sorts reviewed in this space previously Perchance To Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel To Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Since I was on a roll, was being guided by the ghost of Raymond Chandler maybe, I decided to check out Spenser again. And because we still had several weeks left of summer and crime novels have the virtue of not only being easy on the brain in the summer heat but quick reads I figured to play out my hand a little and read a few other Parker works. Now we are all caught up on genesis.
