Fourth of July: Not for Me

	Workers Vanguard No. 1137	27 July 2018

Fourth of July: Not for Me

(Letter)

5 July 2018

Dear WV,

This year’s Fourth of July festivities in Chicago were rudely interrupted by a long and intense downpour of rain. The crowd that had come out to watch the fireworks was multi-racial, but a large percentage of the celebrants were white suburban families. I wondered if the cold shower had woken any of them up to the day-to-day horrors of life in black America, where dilapidated housing, lead-infused water, lack of access to adequate nutrition or a quality public education, police brutality and mass incarceration are mundane, inescapable realities. Probably not.

Anyone celebrating America’s birthday ought to take with them the whole package: a nation whose military murders innocent people all over the world, whose government would rather imprison black and Latino youth than fund schools, and whose elected officials unapologetically push their relentless campaign of racist, anti-immigrant xenophobia. I see no cause for rejoice.

I did not partake in the festivities, but I could hear the fireworks from inside my apartment. The explosions sounded like echoes from the first, bourgeois American Revolution, echoes which resounded in the American Civil War to smash the slave system. I know that those echoes will return a third time to finish what the Civil War started, to overthrow racist American capitalism and sweep the brutal oppression and exploitation of this rotten system into the dustbin of history. That will be something to celebrate.

Yours,
R.S.

London: Fascist Attack on Union Leader For Union/Minority Action to Stop the Fascists!

Workers Vanguard No. 1137	27 July 2018

London: Fascist Attack on Union Leader

For Union/Minority Action to Stop the Fascists!

We reprint below a July 21 leaflet issued by our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain.

On 14 July, following a rally of some 6,000 supporters of jailed fascist English Defence League (EDL) founder Tommy Robinson, a gang of fascist thugs launched a vicious assault on members of the RMT [National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers] union as they sat drinking in a Westminster pub. Assistant general secretary of the union Steve Hedley and his partner Bridget Power were hospitalised after Robinson’s supporters hurled glasses and metal chairs at them. Several other RMT members were injured in the attack. Hedley had earlier spoken at a counter-protest against Robinson. True to form, the police detained both Hedley and Power for having the temerity to defend themselves. After her release from hospital with bruised ribs, Power was held in police custody for several hours.

The same day as the attack on the RMT, the fascists surrounded a London bus, terrorising the driver—a Muslim woman wearing a hijab. In June, 15,000 Robinson supporters, some giving Nazi salutes, marched through London before attacking anti-racist counter-protesters. A march in Leeds, also in June, was followed some days later by the firebombing of a mosque and a Sikh gurdwara [temple]. These attacks underline that fascism is not a system of bad ideas which can be defeated through exposure, or argued away. Fascists differ from right-wing ideologues such as UKIP [UK Independence Party] in that they are paramilitary gangs whose purpose is racist terror and ultimately the destruction of the workers movement.

That fascist scum feel bold enough to assault a prominent leader of one of the country’s most powerful unions is an ominous development. The RMT organises tens of thousands, including large numbers of black and Asian workers. This represents considerable social power that the fascists should fear.

While trade unions have endorsed the recent anti-fascist counter-protests, their mobilisation has been limited to small numbers of workers behind union banners. The organisers of these protests see the unions as just one more constituency alongside “faith groups” and leftists. What’s needed is not bringing out trade union members as atomised individuals, but mobilising disciplined contingents of unionised workers. Standing at the head of the oppressed, the workers movement uniquely has the numbers, organisation and power to sweep the fascists off the streets.

It is the decaying capitalist order that creates the conditions in which the fascists thrive and the fight against fascism is therefore inseparable from the fight to overthrow the capitalist system. Mobilising the unions to defend workers and the oppressed requires a political fight against the trade union bureaucracy, which is wedded to capitalism and to class collaboration and has not waged an effective fight to defend union members against austerity, much less defend minorities.

The police persecution of Hedley and Power illustrates the folly of looking to the forces of the capitalist state to act against the fascists. The state is not “neutral” between the fascists and the workers movement. The police, along with the army, the courts and the prisons are the core of the capitalist state—the repressive apparatus that defends the property and the interests of the capitalists against the working class and oppressed. The job of the police includes breaking workers strikes, brutalising black and Asian people and spying on leftists and trade unionists.

Reliance on the cops for protection against the fascists is suicidal, but that is precisely the programme of Unite Against Fascism (UAF) and Stand Up To Racism (SUTR). The 14 July counter-protest jointly organised by the UAF and SUTR ultimately relied on police to defend the 3,000 anti-fascist demonstrators against much bigger forces of fascists and other reactionaries.

The British capitalist rulers today do not need to resort to fascism to crush the workers movement. However, the capitalist rulers hold the fascist shock troops in reserve so that they can be unleashed against the working people in times of social upheaval. The fascists today are small, but the workers movement must understand it is precisely when they are weak that the fascists must be crushed.

At bottom, the union misleaders and the reformist left push illusions that the way to combat fascism is by electing a Corbyn-led Labour [Party] government. In contrast, the Spartacist League’s perspective of mobilising union power to stop the fascists also aims to imbue the working class with consciousness of its social power and revolutionary potential. This is a step towards building a revolutionary party, a champion of all the oppressed, which can lead the working class to overturn the depraved capitalist system which is itself the source of fascist barbarism.

In Honor Of Oliver Crowmwell And Latter Republicans- Britain Abolish the Monarchy! Harry Foregoes Swastika at Royal Wedding

Workers Vanguard No. 1137	27 July 2018

Britain

Abolish the Monarchy!

Harry Foregoes Swastika at Royal Wedding

The following article is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 242 (Summer 2018), newspaper of our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain.

The phrase “bread and circuses”—coined by the Roman satirist Juvenal—describes the means by which an exploiting class seeks to divert the plebs from thoughts of rebellion. While Britain’s capitalist rulers don’t bother much with the bread, royal births and weddings are milked for all they’re worth. In the latest royal circus, Prince Harry, whose most memorable previous exploit was to dress in Nazi regalia for a “natives and colonials” party, was married to mixed-race American actress Meghan Markle. Up to 1,200 hand-picked “commoners” were allowed within the perimeter of Windsor Castle to join in the celebrations, although they were expected to bring their own food and drink.

The admittance of a black woman into the House of Windsor (now she’s got her visa sorted and been baptised in the Church of England) is absurdly presented by a fawning bourgeois media as the recasting of the feudal freak show that is the monarchy to be less “gammon” [white conservative] and more “woke.” One Guardian article (20 May) described the wedding as a “rousing celebration of blackness”; a black gospel choir sang and the black Episcopalian bishop Michael Curry began his sermon with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. and talked about the misery of slavery.

The British monarchy knows a thing or two about slavery—its empire was built in part on the trade in African men, women and children. Royal “tradition” is inextricably tied to the blood-soaked history of British colonial subjugation of countless millions of mainly dark-skinned people, a past that is still embodied in the British Commonwealth, with the monarch at its head. As the day of the wedding approached, images of the burnt-out shell of Grenfell Tower [housing project where fire killed 72 poor and immigrant residents in 2017] and the racist abuse of the “Windrush generation” of Commonwealth citizens [post-WWII immigrants from the Caribbean] offered stark reminders that capitalist Britain remains a racist hellhole.

For Prince Harry, posing as a Nazi was not merely “insensitive” youthful high jinks, as the media would have it. It is no accident that the authoritarianism of the jack-booted Nazi regime exerts an attraction on the monarchy. In 2015, the Sun made public a Windsor family home movie from the 1930s which showed the Queen’s mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, teaching the seven-year-old Elizabeth how to salute like a Nazi. Also seen giving the stiff-armed salute was the future Edward VIII, the Queen’s uncle, who was notorious for his Nazi sympathies and friendship with Adolf Hitler.

Thus does the House of Windsor (formerly House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, before the anti-German sentiment whipped up during World War I mandated a name change) express in unvarnished fashion the haughty contempt of the British imperialist ruling class for working-class people and the rulers’ feelings of racial superiority over their former colonial slaves. The royal family remains the embodiment of the reactionary “United Kingdom,” which incorporates the Orange statelet in Northern Ireland and rests on English domination over the Scottish and Welsh nations. The monarchy’s linchpin role in the United Kingdom is captured by the fact that Harry was not only made Duke of Sussex but was also given newly minted Scottish and Northern Irish titles: Earl of Dumbarton and Baron Kilkeel.

The role of the monarchy at the pinnacle of British imperialism is far from simply ornamental. The monarchy is a potential rallying point for reaction in times of social crisis, when the bourgeoisie feels its rule threatened. It is not to Parliament but to the Queen that the armed forces swear allegiance. In his 1925 work Where Is Britain Going? Leon Trotsky, co-leader with VI Lenin of the Russian Revolution, noted that Labour MPs [Members of Parliament] of the day voted in Parliament to give funds to the Prince of Wales for an overseas tour. Trotsky sharply observed: “How can they assault bourgeois property if they dare not refuse pocket money to the Prince of Wales?”

This is the tradition upheld by Jeremy Corbyn. While he is constantly goaded by the Tories and the Blairites in his own party for being insufficiently obsequious to the monarchy, Corbyn was nonetheless among those offering his congratulations to “Harry and Meghan.” As he prepares for office in the hallowed halls of Westminster, Corbyn’s lifelong republicanism has gone the same way as his longstanding opposition to the European Union. In an interview with the New Statesman (30 July 2015), Corbyn was asked “Would you abolish the monarchy?” His response was: “Listen, I am at heart, as you very well know, a republican. But it’s not the fight I’m going to fight: it’s not the fight I’m interested in.”

We Marxist revolutionaries take inspiration from an altogether different tradition. Oliver Cromwell and the 17th century bourgeois revolutionaries overthrew the feudal order and chopped off the head of Charles I. A workers revolution would have as its first task sweeping away all the feudal crap of the past. Our model is the Bolshevik Party which led the workers and peasants of the Russian tsarist empire in sweeping away the capitalist and landlord exploiters, in the process extinguishing Tsar Nicholas II’s Romanov dynasty—relatives of Prince Philip.

When asked to describe the political philosophy of the Queen Mother, one royal secretary quoted the words of the hymn “All things bright and beautiful”: “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate—God made them high and lowly and order’d their estate” (Guardian, 15 September 2009). The continued existence of feudal relics such as the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established churches is indeed an assertion that social privilege, vast inequality and rigid social hierarchy are simply the “natural” order. These institutions are an affront to the working class and to elementary democratic principles.

From The Archives-No- From Today's Front Pages In Portland- As The First Anniversary Of Charlottesville Approaches-We Are In A Cold Civil War In America-No Platform For Fascists-No Platform For Nazis Or KKK Either-Join And Built The People’s Resistance

From The Archives-No- From Today's Front Pages In Portland-   As The First Anniversary Of Charlottesville Approaches-We Are In A Cold Civil War In America-No Platform For Fascists-No Platform For Nazis Or KKK Either-Join And Built The People’s Resistance  

August 6. 2018 Update-

A few friends, close friends at that, have taken me up short when I mention to them, to the political world beyond them as well that we are in the throes of a “cold civil war.” They look at me in disbelief. Look at me as if I was in some 1930s Germany time warp (even there they are wrong it is the 1920s which set the stage for the 1930s horrors not out of the blue) harping on the divide in this American society. A divide I did not make or make up but through plenty of things, tensions, from race to class have brought things to a boiling point. Then things like Charlottesville last year, things like Portland this weekend where the cold civil war took at heated turn between the alt-right and anti-fa and who knows what next weekend in Washington, D.C. on first anniversary of Charlottesville. Those friends still smirk a little but all I know is that as I have repeated mentioned I did not believe that in my six decade I would be seriously discussing the danger from the fascists small as it seemed a while back but more menacing now. More later-much more.

By Frank Jackman

[I really hate to start a piece with a bracketed introduction, really a double bracketed introduction since I had to do the same when I introduced the original piece last year around this time in the wake of the events in Charlottesville down in Virginia, down in the college town of the University of Virginia. However given the nature of the subject, no, given the impeding urgency of the subject the heating up of the cold civil war in America, a phenomenon not seen in this country since the decade before Civil War which ended slavery only after a series of compromises proved illusionary to end the damn institution and the only way to resolve the situation was with arms in hand and its concurrent phenomenon the rise of the organized fascist movement, aided not a little by the rabid occupants of the White House and the rest of the governing apparatus we need to talk.

This heating up of the cold civil war is a phenomenon which I have been noting for maybe a decade, maybe a little less but certainly since the big Great Recession as the economists call it now in historical hindsight when many people’s live were hung out to dry, hung out big time which started toward avalanche toward the big break of the have-nots, or maybe have not enough toward the right after flirting with Barack Obama to no avail. During that time, say since 2011 when I reported heavily on the wisp of the will phantom Occupy movement in these pages (and in Progressive Nation now on-line but which I was one of the hard copy founders of back in the 1970s but which was subsequently bought to a writers collective), I have interviewed many of those who have not move forward, no, who have been left behind for no fault of their own and no reason that they can figure out why they lost out except that now they have a handle on the damn thing as victims of globalization, liberal cabal globalization.

Still in 2016 despite knowing, feeling this unsatisfied undercurrent I was as taken aback, as shocked, and plainly speaking as clueless as any other of the talking class, of the political pundits who are supposed to have a ide about what was what in the political arena. Worse on the second point, on that rise of the fascistic elements from their cubbyholes and warrens in backwoods America, was not that I was unaware of it, hell, I had done a whole series on militias, survivalists and others who had a morbid fear ignited by their race hatreds, by their hatred of Barack Obama despite their generally have no contact ever with black people and despite not living within fifty miles of any black communities, barrios, Asian enclaves or urban Jews. Jesus. What had, has me stumped in that after fifty years or more of political struggle, fifty years since I wrote my first term paper on fascist groups in America (think of the name George Lincoln Rockwell as the poster child of that movement back then) I have to go out on the streets and hold the bastards off. Below is a quick review and summary of the past year complete with that bracketed introduction, now second introduction, that I have threatened you with. Frank Jackman]              

Original Introduction

[Under the now not so new direction of site manager Greg Green who has made some mistakes and made some very right decisions as is usual for chief editors and assignment impresarios we writers, young and old, free-lance or staff, stringers or by-line worthy have been given the green light as part of our works to discuss how we got the assignment or any other material the reader may find interesting as back story. I will do so here in a review of what I have called the impeding cold civil war in American over the past period. Frank Jackman]  

Sometimes out in the political hustings you come across a piece of written propaganda which hits you exactly where you live. Expresses your sentiments better than you could on your own. That is the case with the small, inexpensive paper leaflet that I picked up, or was handed to me, at an anti-fascist demonstration last summer on the Boston Common which I was covering for this publication. I subsequently received the same copies at a few other anti-fascist rallies and stand-outs again not sure which I picked up and which were handed to me although that is of no import to the political message stated. This “pick-up” “handed” conundrum the result of the fact that I grab one way or another every piece of literature that I come across at any rallies or such events that I cover or take part in.        

I headlined the beginning of this piece with the statement that we are in a cold civil war in this country, in America, and have been for a while, maybe the last twenty years at least but that fact has only been pushed in our faces bigtime since the age of Trump began where all the contradictions, all the divisions and all the cultural clashes have become part of the daily political battleground. There have been over the past year or so some important nodal points making that cold civil get at least momentarily hotter-one was horrendous Charlottesville which put all on notice that the divisions were deep and maybe had reached some boiling point. Make no mistake that Charlottesville was a “victory” for what passes as the Alt-Right, Nazi-Fascist-KKK-Militia combine which has been emboldened by the rise of the Trump reaction. Another was the recent nationwide student lead-high school student-led March for Our Lives demonstration, so you know this is something very different on the political horizon which was a “victory” for our side, for the people’s resistance which is important if we can keep up the momentum.  

One of the problems if you will of our side is that some people, a lot of people, many of whom have only recently come to political life have many mixed and confused feelings about what to do to stop the Alt-Right-Nazis-Fascist-KKK in their tracks. Have bought into at least partially the notion that these bastards have some “right” to free speech that we must respect. That we must expend political capital defending. “Forget that noise” as the late Pete Markin, a guy I grew up with and who gave me plenty of political insights said and would say today as well. We are private citizens and not governmental agents so have no obligation to defend such rights to free speech under any constitutional theory.

But the Constitution is only the bedrock of running a civil society. We the people of the resistance have to be clear that we do not support any right for the Alt-Right-Fascist-Nazi-KKK-Militia cabal to free speech to spew their genocidal, ethnic-cleansing, race war programs. And that, as history shows us, and everybody should read the history of the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, is their calling card, their intention and we had better be clear that we have to nip that movement in the bud. Not only by confronting them across the police lines, police lines there to protect them and their so-called right to free speech since the police are governmental agents but to make sure they find not havens, no platforms, to spew their hateful messages. So yes so-called free speech issues take a very far back seat to the fight against the intentions of these monsters if we don’t stop them. Believe me they don’t give three-fifth of a damn about our free speech rights, will see us in hell first another sign we are in a cold civil war situation. More later.    

In Boston –The Latest Bash Back Boston-Stop The Fascists In Their Tracks November 18^th on Boston Common  

Frank Jackman comment:

I have mentioned on more than one occasion that we have been for a while in a state of cold civil war in America that has only had fuel to the fire added to it, make it tend toward a hot civil war, by the massive frauds, midnight rip-off actions, and general ignorance promoted by the Trump Administration. This rightly, and I think most thankfully, has gotten the previously moribund left, the bewildered and the oppressed up in arms enough to slowly begin a counter-attack against the night-takers from corrupt and venal right-wing bourgeois politicians like Trump and his ilk to the more dangerous extra-parliamentary forces-call them alt-right, fascist, KKK, etc. that have been unleashed-have been given fresh wind in their sails.

Not everything the left and its allies argue for in counter-attack either makes senses or provides a road forward in the anti-fascist struggle for example RefuseFascism has identified the Trump-Pence regime as fascist and to call for a parliamentary impeachment process to get rid of the bums. This Bash Back Boston grouping seems to be more militant but not quite sure that confrontation in itself without more gets us anyplace. I leave it an open question today. But for now as we sort things out, or as they get sorted for us which is as likely and has actually been the case over the past several months, let’s keep to the united front idea going until further notice. In short Saturday November 18^th in Boston be on the Boston Common to stop the Nazis, fascists and their ilk in their tracks whatever anti-fascist ideas you march under. 

           

In Boston Nov 4 -ResistFascism Rally Report From Allan Franklin

By Political Reporter Frank Jackman

[I have recently at Allan Jackson’s, the site administrator, request done a review of a lesser Humphrey Bogart movie Sirocco from the early 1950s because it had a political theme-or at least touched about what World War I wrought on the world beyond murder and mayhem in the trenches on all sides. Because I spent some time on that and a few other projects I missed a local event in Boston on the Boston Common on November 4^th sponsored by an organization called ResistFascism.org who were attempting to build some momentum to publicize an upcoming counter-demonstration against a thing called “Rally For The Republic,” a seemingly innocuous front name for a cohort of Nazis, Alt-Rights, KKK, White Supremacists, wacky Trump supporters and street thugs to be held at the Parkman Bandstand on November 18^th . The grouping had applied for but had been rejected for a permit to use that facility by the City of Boston but nevertheless intended to demonstrate that day for “free speech” rights or whatever other cover story they were pushing. The “call” for the rally itself told the real story that what they wanted was a street fight, especially targeting their nemeses the Anti-fa black-clad anarchists and Black Lives Matter.

Not to belabor the point the idea of a gathering momentum rally on the 4^th sounded like a good idea and so I detached my associate at the on-line Progressive America, Allan Franklin, to go check out and report back on the event. My premise for even bothering him with the assignment was that the literature associated with the event, including a full- page ad in the New York Times by ResistFascism made it appear like it was going to be a prelude similar to the massive 40, 000 plus counter-rally in Boston also held on August 19^th also at the Parkman Bandstand. As Allan will report that was not the case, not by a long shot although this resurgent fascist (and their sundry allies) menace needs to be combatted and combatted with massive counter-demonstrations to make them go back into their rat holes or wherever they hang out. To “crush them in the egg” as an old-time militant antifascist once told me who had been close to the Socialist Workers Party in the 1930s when James Cannon had told an audience in New York City that he had heard their chief, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, use that expression for the tasks ahead against the Nazi-night-takers. (That militant had at that time been instrumental through his union in bringing out a mass of working people to surround Madison Square Garden in that city when the fascist thugs tried to get a toehold there so I am sure he had the Trotsky remark on good authority.)

Allan, and I had agreed, had expected to take his notes and make a “think piece” story to be published here and at Progressive America. Subsequently we have decided to merely publish his somewhat edited notes which gives as much flavor to the event as it deserved.

Frank Jackman]              

[In the event the November 18^th “rally” drew about fifty to one hundred demonstrators and a counter-rally of about one thousand to fifteen hundred mainly Anti-fa, Black Lives Matter and Veterans for Peace militants. Curiously except for a couple of people that Allan had recognized from the November 4^th rally selling newspapers and passing out leaflets there was no identifiable presence by this ResistFascism operation on the Common at least. From their literature they had planned a rally at Copley Square about one half mile away from the Common although it might as well have been ten thousand miles away as far as visibly confronting the fascist menace that day. Frank Jackman]    

*****

Frank- Here are my observations about the ResistFascism rally that took place at the Parkman Bandstand on November 4, 2017 which we, you and I, have had many e-mail and phone conversations about with the organizers who wanted us to publicize the thing and cover it extensively. Also between us about our approach to a group we knew very little about except their literature and their persistent at the time and that unlike the paltry sums most leftist operations can gather these days they must have had an “angel” to be able to put a full page ad in the New York Times.

I showed up at the advertised spot, the Parkman Bandstand, about 3:30 for the 4:00 event at which time there were maybe twenty people gathered while the organizers were putting up signs and stocking a table with literature. (At first I thought I had the wrong spot not having been on the Common in years and figuring that maybe it was to be at the Park Street MBTA station entrance one of the historic protest spots on the Common that I knew from previous events but after asking if this was the right place of a person milling around I found I was indeed at the right spot.) After finding I was in the right place I knew almost immediately that this event was going to be far smaller than it was hyped up to be and which the organizers hounded us to publicize extensively beforehand and provide plenty of coverage for on the day of the event.

I did meet Steve, whom you told me you had plenty of contact via e-mail and cellphone with when he noticed my press tag and we talked for a bit. He continued to badger me about covering the November 18^th event they were planning at Copley Square. I told him frankly I did not see how a rally in Copley when the fascists were going to be on the Common a half mile away made sense, made a statement to the scumbags, made a statement about effectively resisting fascism as advertised. He demurred at that point and told me he had to help set up. This Steve seemed like a nice guy of the old school 1960s organizer sort that I have run into a lot in New York and out in San Francisco lately who under current adverse conditions are keeping up the good fight as best they can in an age when the social media technology and the subsequent generations’ organizing style have down-graded the old time ways of putting together protest rallies out in the real mean streets.

I sensed and somebody I talked to later knowledgeable about the leftist remnant still around the Cambridge/Boston milieu that this operation was an off-shoot of the old “Not In My Name” grouping from Iraq War 2003 days which was organized by an old-time cultist Maoist who didn’t hear he, Mao, died or something. It definitely had that liberal democratic feel especially around the main villains of the piece in their literature Trump/Pence and the urgent need to impeach them as if that would create the “newer world” you and the older guys I know are always harping back to when stuff like this comes up and you get all misty-eyed about the huge X number of people who came to some event against war, racism, capitalism, whatever about fifty years ago.     

  

The rally itself when I left about 5:30 never had more than one hundred people and that is perhaps generous considering the number of student journalists and other such curious student types who apparently were assigned by their professors to do coverage as a class assignment. The usual run of  general curiosity seekers who peek around the edges of such events getting confirmation for their distant hometown fears that Boston is some Red Moscow of the East Coast and making note never to send their kids to school in the town listening to the usual speakers preaching to the choir about that war, racism, sexism you and your crowd are always talking about how you almost had turned the corner on that stuff but you underestimated the forces of counter-attack arraigned against you and have been on the run ever since. Of course this included the usual Kumbaya folk music that is supposed to stir the crowd to a revolutionary pitch by evoking Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and who knows who else singing about the magic wand of getting rid of oppression. All in a regular left event day’s schedule.

I did notice that on a hand-out leaflet ResistFascism was advertising marching in a veteran’s peace parade on the 11^th, on Veterans Day and giving our starting time and place. I urged all the people I met to join that march that day since we are very familiar with and support the efforts of the main sponsor Veterans for Peace although I think you told me they were trying to reclaim the original purpose of the day by calling it Armistice Day since Sam Lowell, Fritz Taylor and I think Allan Jackson are Vietnam-era veterans, right.          

There were a few minor heavy verbal confrontations between protesters and a few Alt-right people who showed up obviously to do “recon” and size up what was what knowing they could get a row going by spitting out their garbage in a small environment. One from Salisbury, a young Iraq War veteran who portrayed himself as only interested in a dialogue with the left, told me he was an organizer for the so-called Alt-right rally on the 18^th. When I asked him about the rally “call” which we had culled from Facebook being inflammatory, calling for a street fight like you said after you read the Facebook announcement, he said just like the far left they had their crazy far right who wanted to stir things up. Take that for what it is worth, although one thing I have noticed about this newer breed of whatever you want to call these modern fascists is that that they are a bit slicker than the old guys who used to breath fire and damnation against the generic left, n----rs, gays, women and “commies” without blinking at eye. They are more media savvy and couch things in terms like “free speech,” “oppression,” “railing against the elites” and the like. Off the top of my head I think we have to treat them at least in the post-Charlottesville era where they showed some unsavory savvy and skills as being as smart as us in this war of words and images.    

Not much heated argument although a woman started yelling about those NFL players who went down on their knees during the national anthem before their football games and got into an argument with an Anti-fa who seemed very much the angry young man masked and dressed in Johnny Cash black of course.  A Veteran for Peace guy whom I think you know, at least he said he knew you, was able to calm her down a bit and she left. (I told him that I had been urging people I talked to during this time to join the Veterans Day peace march which would be starting near this section of the Common and he corrected me by calling it Armistice Day so I guess they are serious about reclaiming the day, or at least the name.      

All and all a waste of time and I told Jeff whom you had also assigned to this story to do interviews and take some photos and who was heading down to meet me to go home. Stuff might have happened after I left but I don’t think so. I am glad we had a hands-off with this R-F group although if they show up with any forces on the 11^th for that Veterans for Peace march let’s see what they have to offer. 

I felt sorry for you and Allan since you were inundated by phone calls and e-mails for stuff that seemed like a big deal and was all smoke and dreams. We have to help save your time and energy for the big stuff not this Mickey Mouse stuff so we better screen this stuff better.

*For Johnny Hodges; 112th Birthday- The Swing Era- When Clarinetist Barney Bigard Held Forth

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Barney Bigard and his trio performing "Steps Step Down".

CD Review

An Introduction to Barney Bigard; His Best Recordings, Barney Bigard, Best of Jazz: The Swing Era Series, 1995

As I have mentioned in previous reviews of various classical jazz artists I came to an appreciation of that musical art from one source, and one source only- Lady Day, Billie Holiday. Along the way I started to get interested in her various back-up musicians which led me to the likes of Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, Artie Shaw and others. And, of course, when you get to Johnny Hodges you naturally have to think the Duke- Ellington that is. And when you get to Duke then you have to delve into his various formations from trios up to orchestra and along the way, clarinetist Barney Bigard

Now, for those not familiar with the swing era in jazz, or know swing and the place of the clarinet in it mainly through the great work of Benny Goodman, then Barney Bigard may not be known to you. However, those who know jazz better than I do say, pound for pound, Barney was a better clarinetist. I will leave that for the aficionados but in this CD you will get many of his great performances with various Duke Ellington group configurations and a few of his own compositions so YOU can judge. That is the beauty of this Best of Jazz Series-each artist gets to strut his or her stuff and then we can fight it out over virtuosity. Check it out.

When The Whole World Reached Out For One Sweet Breathe Of Hollywood Glamour When It Counted-In Honor Of The Commemoration of 100th Birthday Of Rita Hayworth-Who Is That Dancing With Rita Hayworth?-Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly’s Cover Girl (1944)-A Film Review

Who Is That Dancing With Rita Hayworth?-Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly’s Cover Girl (1944)-A Film Review 

When The Whole World Reached Out For One Sweet Breathe Of Hollywood Glamour When It Counted-In Honor Of The Commemoration of 100^th Birthday Of Rita Hayworth

By Si Lannon  

You know the Internet is a wonderful tool at times especially for sites like this one very interested in history, of everything from governments to holy goofs. Most of the time you can find out information or information comes your way when you are perusing for something else. That was the case last year when I was looking something up at the archives of American Film Gazette and noticed they were doing a serious commemoration of the 100^th birthday of ruggedly handsome and versatile male hunk from the 1940s Robert Mitchum. That information led to a full-scale retrospective of his work, or the best of it anyway. The best being his noir stuff where he is hunk style and manly ready to take a few punches, throw a few, take an errant slug or two, bang-bang a few too for some dame, for some femme who had him all twisted up inside trying to find the mystery of her. Fat chance of discovering that as a million guys since Adam, maybe before have found out the hard way, although usually not  at the end of some femme fatale gun.

Not so with the way I got the information about 1940s sex siren and maker of guys, who knows maybe gals too and not just lesbians or bi’s either although they can have their stares just like anybody else but in their own right beautiful women who will concede that she has bested them, steamy midnight dreams Rita Hayworth. I was in Harvard Square on some unrelated business when I passed the famous and historic Brattle Theater a place I knew well in my 1970s cheap date period and have probably seen more films there than any other place. But video stores, studio comps, and lately Netflix and Amazon have taken the place of going to the big screen theater for me for many years now just because it is easier and more efficient to see the films at my discretion. For old-time’s sake I decided to take an “upcoming schedule” broadside which was provided in a little box in front of the theater entrance. When I opened it up later there was one of the icons of icons of Hollywood glamour when that burg was the only game in town and when glamour meant something to eye candy hungry soldiers and sailors, airmen too, during World War II and their waiting for the other shoe to drop anxious honeys sitting in dark movie houses too. Yes, Rita in a 1940s provocative, although what would now draw nothing but a snicker from even naïve eight grade girls, sun suit with that patented come hither if you dare look that every guy, every cinematic guy, begged to get next to. Was ready to take the big step off for like her then husband Orson Welles almost did in the fatal Lady From Shanghai.   

What the theater was doing and was famous for in the old days when the classic no money classic college date world was when I lived was a big retrospective of her work from early B-film stuff as she made her way up the Hollywood stardom food chain to some astonishing dance routines with Fred Astaire making you watch her moves not his something hard to do believe me to the later femme fatale classics like Gilda and the previously mentioned Lady From Shanghai  and then the drop back to B-films and cameos at the end of her career. Since the theater had treated her to this royal treatment I decided the least I could was to do a retro-review of those efforts for a now glamour-hungry world. That type of “innocent” glamour will never come back, the world is just a bit too weary and wary for that to happen but the younger sets should at least know why their grandfathers and grand-grandfathers stirred to her every move, pinned her photo up on a million lockers and in a million duffle bags.

My own Rita experience is like many things in the film business when Hollywood was top dog, rightly or wrongly, second hand from those cheap date retrospectives and earlier, high school earlier with Allan Jackson who used to rule the roost at this publication. In those old Acre neighborhood days, usually Saturdays, we would hike a couple of miles up the carless road to the old Strand Theater in Adamsville Center and watch plenty of 1940s films since to save money Sal Cadger the gregarious owner of the theater on first run features from the studios filled up the screen with this older material. We loved it, have loved it ever since. Bang-the first time I saw Rita sa-sashing into her hubby’s casino down in Buenos Aires, I think that is right, and stumbles onto ex-flame down and out gambler on a losing streak Glenn Ford, to find him working for her old man. Electricity beyond whatever words I could use to describe that tension in the air which spelled some hard times for somebody. I hope the reader will get an idea of that is this series as we commemorate Rita’s 100^th birthday year.       

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DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Cover Girl, starring Rita Hayworth. Gene Kelly, Phil Silvers, 1944     

Turnabout is fair play or at least that is what we learned when we were kids and maybe there is something to the matter. The turnabout here is who is watching who in the film under review the 1944 musical Cover Girl. That watching part was predicated by a remark my longtime friend, companion and fellow writer here Sam Lowell mentioned in a review he did of an earlier musical featuring the dancing pair of Fred Astaire and the female dancer here the vivacious Rita Hayworth. Yes that Rita Hayworth who half the guys, the G.I.s in the muds of World War II Europe or on forsaken Pacific atolls has photos of, pin-ups in the lingo of the times, hanging somewhere to remind them of well, let’s just say reminded them of home. Sam had made a big deal of having previously gushed over Fred’s exquisite and strong-legged dancing in previous efforts with former partner Ginger Rogers where he was the focal point of whatever creation was being performed. Not so when Rita came on board since Sam was at one with those guys in the muds and on those damn forsaken atolls and according to my father who was there they really had pin-up dreams, well let’s just leave it at that.     

Needless to say, that there, as here, although I am bound by my contract to say a few words about the plot of the film, what Sam always called the skinny and that seems right in dealing with musicals the mere presence of Rita as the much sought-after Cover Girl of every dream made the dancing of the usually physically very present Gene Kelly from nowhere. That, my friends, as much as a feminist as I like to think about myself as being in these troubled times is my opinion as well. On this showing. Since Sam and I watched this one together (he would have pouted for about three weeks if he didn’t get his Rita fix) I remarked to him how much Rita’s mere presence in a scene lighted the whole thing up. And this a film over seventy years old.      

Here is that skinny I was mentioning above that I am duty-bound to run through although I have already given anybody, male or female, the reason to see the film if that is what is holding anybody back. Rita and Gene, Rusty and Danny, are slowly working their way up the dancing food chain via Danny’s Brooklyn nightclub (that location unlike today when everything is coming up roses in that borough, a snub, a reference to the backwaters of New York City, nowhere in other words) but mainly they are in love and can go either way on the climb up the ladder business. As long as they have each other. That is until a Mayfair swell, a Manhattan Mayfair swell was slumming one night at Danny’s after seeing Rita apply for the cover girl cover of the title. Then the chase is on. It seems that Mayfair swell was all set to marry Rusty’s grandmother, also a dancer back in her day, who looked amazing like Rusty how did they do that, and thus showing some DNA connection to granddaughter, but she a free-spirit and the bane of Mayfair swell’s mother flew the coop, left him at the alter. A sad but hardly unique tale.

Mayfair swell is not just any bourgeois playboy turning gray but the publisher of Cover Girl magazine which every good-looking young woman who had any ambitions that way would die to be on. Naturally, despite six million false denials, Rusty wanted in. Got in and got on the first rung of the ladder to high society, New York style. Sans Danny, or so it seemed. Mayfair swell even set Rusty up with an up and coming Broadway producer in the days when Broadway was the be all and end all of real acting, of the legitimate theater as they used to tout the tag. Rusty bought into the whole plan, including marriage to said producer. You know where all this substitution is heading so you know that in the end she jilts the guy just like granny did in her time and goes running back to blues struck Danny. I will never ever not say when reviewing a musical that the plotline is nada, not a thing and the thing is the dance and the lyrics to the music. Except here it is really Rita going through her paces. Sorry Gene you will get your chance in An American In Paris so don’t fret.             

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of Singer From The Soul Otis Redding

On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Death Of Singer From The Soul Otis Redding

By Josh Breslin

The beauty of art, music, you know cultural artifacts is that they can last, outlast their creators. The beauty of art, music you know cultural artifacts in the modern age is that you can access almost anything via some site on the Internet. What you cannot do is get a sense of certain personalities, certain singers in this case that you had seen in person once that have passed on. That was the case with the singer from the soul Otis Redding who passed away fifty years ago this year. (Hell, even I can’t believe it has been that long). Saw Otis in his prime, saw Otis with my then flame, a gal we all called Butterfly Swirl (real name Carol Callahan) a surfer girl from Carlsbad out on the Pacific Coast Highway just then slumming, thank god, with “hippies” on Captain Crunch’s yellow brick road bus tooling up and down the Pacific Coast at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Was there at the creation of the short sweet legend of Otis. Enough said

Link to a Christopher Lydon Open Source NPR program on the life and times of Otis Redding for an audience 50 years later.

radioopensource.org/afterlife-otis-redding/

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –Erich Maria Remarque, (All Quiet on the Western Front)

As The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –Erich Maria Remarque, (All Quiet on the Western Front)

  

By Seth Garth

A few years ago, starting in August 2104 the 100^th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100^th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.