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.

On The Cultural Front of The 1960s Uprising-The 50th Anniversary Of The Musical “Hair”-A Few Thoughts

On The Cultural Front of The 1960s Uprising-The 50^th Anniversary Of The Musical “Hair”-A Few Thoughts 

A link to an National Public Radio On Point program featuring the 50^th anniversary of the musical and it meaning then, and now:

http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/05/04/fifty-years-of-hair  

By Si Lannon

The first time I heard that Seth Garth was going to preempt political aficionado Frank Jackman and do the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Communist Manifesto writer Karl Marx was upon publication under the former’s name. Which pisses me off since I have been squeezed out apparently of getting any assignments around the incredible number of 1968 events which are having their 50^th anniversary commemorations. (The Marx 200^th anniversary thing intersects 1968 via a then growing interest in his theories among students and young radicals once the old tactics and strategy around Democratic Party takeover politics went asunder.) Upon privately complaining to site manager Greg Green he gave me this assignment to make a few comments of the 50^th anniversary of the musical Hair, on Broadway at least although it had been off-Broadway the year before, one of the few musicals that could have possibly captured some of the pathos, bathos and essence of what was going on in all its messy splendor in that year.

Hair represented that trend away from goodie two shoes formula entertainment like song and dance musicals and thinly pitched family dramatic productions. That represented what the audiences of the 1950s were interested in and still had, have a place in the Great White Way scheme of things. But the unacknowledged (at the time not so now once the cultural critics took their long look at the subject) effect of the vanguard work that was being done in little theaters for little money for little audiences finally took root. Artaud’s Theater of the Absurd, Brecht’s didactic efforts and the like finally found a more receptive general audience. So Hair in 1967-68 did not raise as many hairs among the theater going public as it might have earlier in the decade when it would have been treated as an end of run “beat” saga. That is no to say the subject of intense profanity, vivid sexual reference, an interracial cast and endless paeans to drugs of all sorts didn’t raise hackles, didn’t have members of the audience walking out shaking their heads but as word got out that this was a generational sage for the agents of Aquarius the thing couldn’t be stopped. And as one voice in the above mentioned link noted she was still playing in, albeit in Vermont, one of the last real refuses of the survivors of the Generation of ’68 is still being produced someplace in this wild wicked old land.         

There Will Be Wailing In Winchester (And Not Just Winchester, Either) “The Boy Next Door” 1950s Actor Tab Hunter Has Caught The West-bound Freight-Passes At 86

There Will Be Wailing In Winchester (And Not Just Winchester, Either) “The Boy Next Door” 1950s Actor Tab Hunter Has Caught The West-bound Freight-Passes At 86

By Si Lannon

Yes, there will be wailing and weeping to in towns like Winchester, Westchester, Westwood, West Hollywood, and West Wildwood in certain precincts where women of a certain age (maybe men too which I will explain later), came of age, started male gazing in the 1950s now that heart-throb Tab Hunter, the consummate “boy next door” (that boy next door would not be the one in the next cold water flat in some urban tenement but out in lush lawn Levitt-town, Andersonville, Peoria, Modesto where the winds of change were blowing fierce as the post-World War II generations were beginning their short, too short golden age) has caught the west-bound freight, had passed away at 86. Were weeping, as I will admit I am too but for different reasons, for their virginal lost youths when all seemed possible and now have nothing but burdens and too much time fighting their own wars against the ravages of time. Yeah, thinking back to the first time they heard Tab Hunter singing the forever version of Sonny James’ Young Love coming dreamily through the ubiquitous transistor radio attached closely to their heads to keep prying parents at arms-length. Then they saw him on television and the movies and the swooning began.         

I have my own Tab Hunter freaking boy next door story which I have to get off my chest, fifty years plus off my chest, before I can go on and pay certain respects to Mr. Hunter’s career and his “secret” life. See faraway “boy next door” guys had it easy they just had to look pretty, okay, handsome, have clean fingernails and wavy hair. Above all only stink of sex in a most indirect way to not scare off hovering mothers. Tab Hunter (and some others like Fabian and Conway Twitty) were like catnip to dream-crazy daughters-and their mothers in the 1950s. And therein lies my tale. See I was the real boy next door to a young woman, a girl really, Rosalind O’Brian (I will not get angry at anyone if that name evokes thoughts of princesses in towers awaiting rescue by errant take no prisoners knights or sweet summer nights filled with flower fragrances before the sun goes down since that was what the name evoked in my forlorn heart as well) who would not give me the time of day in sixth grade when I first started doing my own male gaze at the opposite sex. Sure, Rosalind would talk to me, talk a blue streak in class, laugh at some of my sixth-grade nervous humor but when I asked her to go to the Sacred Heart Friday night church dance which were held to keep errant real youth, young bravos, from temptations path in that silly way that priests did everything talk straight about sex, leaving us to learn what we learned on the street, half of it bullshit and dangerously wrong.

Cut to the chase. The reason she gave me for not going to the dance with me was that she had a “crush” on the real boy next door-Tab Hunter-and implied that she was saving herself for his attentions. Here is the kicker, the kick in the teeth, dear sweet Rosalind O’Brian actually went to the dance I asked her to attend with Rod Roberts, a dreamy guy who looked exactly like a boy next door, had wavy blond hair and a winsome smile. Perfidy thy name is Rosalind.             

Well I have gotten over that slight, almost, and now can pay a certain homage to Tab Hunter, especially with what he must have gone through as a female sex symbol when he was as queer as a three-dollar bill, was a closeted gay man until he came out in a memoir in 2006. Damn. Even though Hollywood was a closeted safe haven for gays and lesbians along with places like the Village in New York and North Beach in San Francisco the seals were wrapped up tight with seven seals about “homosexuality” in the community. What we out in the working- class precincts of North Adamsville called faggots and every other foul name before we found out what does it matter who you love, more importantly, that it was not the state’s or any other person’s concern who did what with who. But that was much latter.          

The irony is that we, I, had a beef with Tab Hunter when he could have given a damn about Rosalind’s saving herself for him, would have been more likely to have done his male gazing at one Rod Roberts later in life since the last I heard balding and rotund Rob had gotten married to some guy in Madison, Wisconsin. But what was a sixth-grade kid, a kid raised up in the high holy Roman Catholic religion, to know of such things. Knowing only then the admonition from dear mother to not take rides, candy, from strangers, meaning strange men, perverts lurking in every dark cover waiting to spring. Knowing only that in secret whispers there was talk in the family that one of my cousins was “different.” I have already recounted our ignorant terms for those who we called “light on their feet” and even fag-baited each other just for kicks. Jesus what we went through.     

If you had asked me back in 1957, 1960, 1965 if I would be paying homage to an openly gay man I would have said you were crazy, had a screw loose which is an expression I liked to use then or worse. But you can learn a few things in life. Learn also that fame is fleeting as happened to Tab Hunter once the boy next door lost its appeal to young women. Learned that guys with talent and it is obvious that Tab Hunter has it could have a second career ignited by playing opposite the eternally great Divine in John Water’s Polyester. Could “come out” eventually. Yes, there will be wailing and weeping now that Tab Hunter has caught the west-bound freight. Including a tear here. RIP, Tab Hunter, RIP.      

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 –Siegfried Sassoon, (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer)

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 –Siegfried Sassoon, (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer)

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.

       

Malignant Obsession-Bette Davis and Leslie Howard’s Film Adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” (1934)-A Film Review

Malignant Obsession-Bette Davis and Leslie Howard’s Film Adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” (1934)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sam Lowell

Of Human Bondage, starring Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, based on W. Somerset Maugham’s novel of the same name, 1934

No question love can take some funny turns from eternal bliss to the malignant obsession of medical student Phillip Carey, played by Leslie Howard, for waitperson (then known as waitresses) Mildred Rogers, played in an incredible performance by Bette Davis in the film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. The human, the very human capacity to find love in some very wrong places gets a full-throated workout in this 1934 film. Moreover even though the smitten and tortured character here is a man the feelings know no gender boundaries.     

The first problem for our troubled medical student is the class issue in very class-bound England then, and now. The play between the up and coming doctor and the tart-like waitperson could only spell trouble even if Mildred had been only half as perfidious as she was-always looking for the main chance-for the next Mister Big. The second problem was that the very smitten Phillip was physically- challenged (then called “crippled” which Mildred at one point made a point of being disgusting by when truth time came a-calling). The combination would have been daunting even if Mildred had been less of an opportunist. See while she was leading Phillip on she was also seeing her meal ticket-her Mister Big. Phillip played the sap for her on that one thinking he would marry her when all she was doing was making moves to marry Mister Big. Well Mildred should have checked his credentials or at least his marriage because Mister Big dumped her-turned out he was already married. All he did was leave her to the wind with child. Still Phillip took her back.                  

Okay once is okay but then the next best thing came along, a fellow medical student of Phillip’s and she was off again. Still once it was question of helping or her on the streets with an unwanted child he succumbed again. But he was getting wiser. At least he wasn’t as smitten as in those fresh bloom days. All she kept doing though was holding him in contempt while feeding off his feelings for her. At some point, a point where a young gentile women is interested in him, he begins to withdraw, begins to break from his feverish desire for Mildred as she begins her descent down into well, the gutter, the ”life,”  the hard streets. In the end T.B got her (then called consumption and if I recall earlier called the vapors), left her on deep cheap street and an unloved grave.

Phillip, well Phillip finally got himself free, got free once Mildred passed the shades. Took life in his own hands and grabbed that gentile woman who was made for him. Still Mildred led him on a not so merry chase. An excellent performance by Miss Davis especially one scene when she went berserk and cut up all of Phillip’s precious nude paintings (he had started out as a failed art student) and another when after she had been finally rebuffed by Phillip she spewed forth her utter contempt from day one. Watch this one-and read the book too.            

Oh, Rosalita-With Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind

Oh, Rosalita-With Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind     

By Reviewer Zack James

[Frankly I was a little hesitate to approve the following piece by long- time contributor Zack James who I have known through the old neighborhood where we grew up by my friendship with his oldest brother, Alex. The reason for my hesitancy was my concern for the relevancy of bringing in old time film sex appeal women stars from the 1940s and 1950s in a piece essentially about the trials and tribulations of inter-generational sex these days if you come right down to it. For the most part this site has been populated by pieces and sketches done by members of the generation of ’68 that is post-World War II “baby-boomers,” more often than not male, who are now at an age where they have the time and inclination to wade through some reflections of the past. To keep them warm as they grow old I guess.

A look though at the demographics and the traffic flow provided by the producers of this blogging apparatus shows that the audience for this site is dipping toward a much younger cohort based on their devotions to social media, especially Twitter. Given the demographic trend I was not sure that readers would get the connection between 1940s and 1950s screen queen stars and what was bothering Lou Lyons, a certified member of the generation of ’68 with battle scars to prove the point, who Zack had interviewed for the piece. No question ‘68ers would know of Lauren Bacall if for no other reason than she would be familiar to those who craved those retrospectives revival theaters like the Brattle in Cambridge, the Aurora in the Village and the Majestic in Frisco who endlessly played Humphrey Bogart and pals films. In the case of Ms. Monroe she would be familiar from around the house as fathers and older brothers of that generation saw her as the epitome of 1950s American female blonde sex appeal. To ask Generation X and millennials to draw that same connections seemed fat-fetched to me. Then Zack challenged me to let the reader decide the value of the article and get over my faint-heartedness. So here it is. Peter Markin]      

Maybe it was something in the drinking water but Louis Lyons was beside himself once he figured out the real reason why he spent a couple of weekend nights watching a couple of old-time flicks, films which he had gathered in from his Netflix service. Lou had been on a long term kick about watching, or rather re-watching, films, mostly black and white from his checkered seedy random youth. In those youthful days he would have viewed such films not on his HD television or via the stream of his computer but at his local theater, The Majestic, in his hometown of Oxford out in Western Massachusetts now long since closed and converted into a small tech company office park where he would spent many an ungodly Saturday afternoon viewing the current fare. The use of the “ungodly’ expression was for real since his parents were devout Sixth Day Anabaptists whose day of worship started at midday Saturday and ended at dawn Sunday morning. Although they were liberal enough to see that Lou would have snuck out to the movies anyway they always cast that epitaph his way when he came sheepishly through the door after having been hunkered down with a box of “made last” popcorn (there was a whole art to keeping an eye on the concession stand clerk to see when he or she would get ready to replenish the popcorn machine and avoid getting the last of the “stale” leavings maybe from the night before) and some candy bars purchased at Billy’s Variety and “snuck” in under the watch-less eyes of the ushers (who were usually high school kids who could using and expression common at the time as it turns out “ a rat’s ass” about what the audience did or didn’t do except throw stuff at the screen).  

Later in high school, having grown out of kids’ clothing and Saturday matinees about the same time, he let those “ungodly” epitaphs flow off his back like water off a duck’s back after coming in late on Saturday nights. Reason: or one of the reasons, Lotty Larson who was the first girl who accepted his invitation when he asked her the locally famous, locally famous high school movie date night, question-balcony or orchestra? Orchestra meant maybe one date and out but balcony meant promise of anything from a “feel” inside or out of some girl’s cashmere sweater to a tight space blow job. Lotty said balcony although Lou only got to cope a feel outside her sweater which kept him going for a while (of course he claimed Lotty “played the flute” for him, also a common expression at the time for a blow job to his friends but he, and they, knew he was lying, lying that first night anyway. Later, well, you figure it out).                

This trip, this diversion down rural hills nostalgia road, has a purpose since it was on the same track that was bothering Lou’s old mind. The eternal, infernal, ways of sex which had one way or another bothered Lou’s mind since puberty, maybe before if Doctor Freud and his acolytes were right. The association played out this way. On that recent movie freak Friday night he had watched for the umpteenth time one of his all-time favorite films the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. One of the reasons that he favored that film is that although he did not see it when it had come out since he was only a dream in his parents’ way of life in the wartime 1940s when the film had come out when he did see the film in retrospective in college at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square he had told his date, name now long forgotten in memory, that some of the scenes in that classic were as hot, maybe hotter, between two people with their clothes fully on than half the porno being featured in the Combat Zone in downtown Boston. (Lou vaguely remembered that night was a “hot” date night with that unremembered young woman when they had gone back to her place on Commonwealth Avenue although he did not think what she had seen on-screen had gotten her all horny. Probably the dope after the film did the trick)

After that recent viewing though he had remarked to his wife, his third wife, Moira, that given the best of it Captain Morgan, Bogie’s role, a craggy sea salt, and the young if wayward Marie, the Bacall role, that he had to be at least twice her age, maybe more. (He had actually looked it up on Wikipedia and found Bogie was forty-five and Bacall nineteen at the time so the “maybe more” was definitely in play). That started a short discussion between them about younger women being attracted to older men (as a sign of some kind of distorted social norm older men, “dirty old men” a common way to put the proposition,  being attracted to younger women never made it to the conversation table). No conclusions were drawn at the time by Lou.                   

Saturday night Moira was out attending her weekly bridge party with some of her girlfriends and Lou wound up watching the other film he had ordered from Netflicks the film adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Misfits starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable (with serious supporting roles by Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter). Once again maybe giving Clark, playing the last of the old-time cowboys who drank, whored and got saddled-sored with the best of them Gaye, a decided edge in the looks department over Bogie and the fact of being a real cowboy over a sea captain an older man was attractive to a younger woman, Rosalyn, played by Marilyn Monroe. Lou, a little younger than the older brothers and fathers who saw Ms. Monroe as the epitome of 1950s sexual allure and beauty, had seen the film when he was in high school, alone if he recalled.        

The question of younger women being attracted to older men would not have stuck out as much as it had on those recent nights as it had on the first viewing of the films back in the day but since then there had been Rosalita, his second wife, the wife that Lou had left for Moira. The main reason, although not the only reason, had been the wide gap in age between them, Rosalita had been twenty-five and he almost fifty when he spied her one night in San Francisco at the City Lights Bookstore, the famous one run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the big “beat” hang-out back in the 1950s when being “beat” mean something socially unlike later when he tried to emulate them with black beret, logger’s boots and flannel shirt , and got nothing but laughs from his high school pals and worse from the gals for digging something so passe.

He had been trolling the bookstore, literally, since he had just gotten divorced back in Massachusetts from his first wife, Anna, and after the acrimonious settlement decided he needed to head west and make a new start. Once he got West he figured he needed the company of a woman as well and somebody he had run into at Ginny’s Bar in North Beach had told him that if you were looking for a certain type woman, intellectually curious, maybe a little off-kilter, maybe “easy” too then in San Francisco you hit the bookstores and City Lights was a magnet. (That “custom” was not confined to Frisco Town he had met Moira at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under the same imperative).          

Lou had been looking for a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (in a paperback book format which came with other poems as well including Ginsberg’s homage to his tragic mother-Kaddish) since that was one of his favorite poems, if not his most favorite at the time. Then this thin, brown-eyed, black-haired good-looking young woman whom he at first thought was Spanish, maybe from Mexico given where he was came up behind him and started going on and on about Ginsberg who had just died a few years before. (Rosalita was not Spanish at all but Irish her mother just liked the name.) He was shocked that anybody under the age of forty would know anything about Ginsberg and the importance of his poem not only as a break in the kind of poem that was acceptable in polite society but the harsh social message Ginsberg was laying down. She, not he, asked if he would like to stop at the café and have a cup of coffee. He figured why not (he did not find out until after they had a couple of subsequent dates that women, women of all ages, also trolled the bookstores looking for men, men who say would be looking at something like Howl which told them the guy could at least read unlike some of the beasts they had run across in the bars or at some off-the-wall party).      

That afternoon started their affair but Lou was from the start apprehensive about their differences in ages which came up often along the way, for example, when he mentioned that he had been in Washington on May Day, 1971 and had been arrested in the dragnet that the cops and military had set up that day she didn’t understand, could not get around the idea that people would try to shut down the government if it did not stop the Vietnam War. At times they could work through it like that first day with Ginsberg (she turned out to have been an English major at Berkeley) but other times, times when she tried to coax him into jogging which she was crazy about they would fight civil war worthy battles. He always had the sneaking suspicion that Rosalita was not telling the truth when she mentioned that she had had trouble with her male peers, boys she called them, and had been attracted to older men ever since her father had abandoned her family when she was twelve. She had told him repeatedly that she was looking for the maturity and security that an older man would bring. Lou could never really get that through his head and eventually his tilted his behavior toward giving dear Rosalita reason to boot him out the door. (On top of meeting Moira closer in age to him at the museum when for one last effect to reconcile he and Rosalita had moved to Boston to get a fresh start).

That night after watching those two films and their messages Lou thought though maybe Rosalita had been just like Marie and Rosalyn just needing a safe harbor. Damn.       

From The Marxist Archives- On the Need for a Workers Party

From The Marxist Archives- On the Need for a Workers Party

Workers Vanguard No. 1126 26 January 2018 TROTSKY LENIN On the Need for a Workers Party (Quote of the Week) This January marks the anniversary of the 1938 founding conference of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which was the U.S. section of Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International. We reprint below excerpts from the SWP’s Declaration of Principles on the need for a Leninist vanguard party to lead the proletariat in the fight for socialist revolution. In the early 1960s, the founding cadres of the Spartacist League fought within the SWP to uphold this understanding. They were bureaucratically expelled for opposing the SWP’s deepening capitulation to non-working-class political forces—from Fidel Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrilla fighters in Cuba to the misleaders of the black struggle in the U.S., particularly black nationalists. Today, the program of the International Communist League, including the fight to reforge the Fourth International, represents the Marxist continuity of the revolutionary SWP. The working class, under capitalism and in the initial stages of the socialist revolution, is neither economically nor socially nor ideologically homogeneous. It is united in terms of fundamental historical class interest, and by the urgent needs of the daily class struggle. However, it still remains divided by different income levels and working conditions, by religion, nationality, culture, sex, age. Through the perverting influence of capitalist oppression and propaganda, it is further divided by conflicting ideologies, and weakened by the low cultural and educational level of many of its members. There are, moreover, the divisions between various sections of the working class and its potential allies in the revolutionary struggle. For these reasons, the working class cannot, as a whole or spontaneously, directly plan and guide its own struggle for power. For this, a directing staff, a conscious vanguard, arising out of the ranks of the proletariat and based upon it, participating actively in the day-by-day struggles of the workers and in all progressive struggles, and planning clear-sightedly the broader strategy of the longer-term struggle for state power and socialism, is indispensable. This staff and vanguard constitutes the revolutionary party.... The program of the revolutionary party rests upon the great principles of revolutionary Marxism expounded by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, and representing the summation of experience of the working class in its struggle for power. These principles have been verified in particular in the experiences of the last world war and by the victory of the Russian proletarian revolution. They have been concretized in the basic documents of the first four congresses of the Communist International and the fundamental programmatic documents put forward by the movement for the Fourth International in the past fourteen years. The SWP stands upon the main line of principle developed in these documents. — Declaration of Principles,” printed in The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party (Monad Press, 1982)

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Utah Phillips' "Nevada Jane"

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Utah Phillips' "Nevada Jane"

A YouTube film clip of utah Phillips perfroming his song in honor of Big Bill Haywood's wife, Nevada Jane 


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.