This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Labor's Untold Story In Song- Remember The Heroic Lawrence Textile Strike Of 1912-"Bread And Roses"-Yes, Indeed
A YouTube's film clip of Joan Baez and her late sister Mimi Farina performing "Bread and Roses" about the famous textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912. Poem and Song lyrics-"Bread And Roses"
Poem As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray, Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!" As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men, For they are women's children, and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses! As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread. Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew. Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for roses, too! As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days. The rising of the women means the rising of the race. No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes, But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses! Song Lyrics Song As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray, Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses! As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men, For they are women's children, and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses. As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread. Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew. Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too. As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days, The rising of the women means the rising of the race. No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes, But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses
“You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby” – Julie Roberts’ Mona Lisa Smile” (2003)- A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell
Mona Lisa Smile, starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, 2003
I usually don’t like to start a film review by going off on a somewhat unrelated tangent but since I am now a well-established former film editor I will take that privilege here. Although the film under review, Julia Roberts’ Mona Lisa Smile, has little to do with Leonardo De Vinci’s famed portrait now uncomfortably housed in the Louvre in Paris it does have much to do as will be explained below about art history and so I may not be as tangentially off the mark as one might expect. To get to the point I have held the view that the reticent Ms. Lisa is not smiling at all but is rather perhaps the first pictorial sign in the modern age of ironic detachment. Fire away but that is what has always impressed me about milady (and maybe reflecting too an unsuspecting bit of wit and charade of the part of the famed Type A personality Leonardo).
Now back to business. Back to the art history part that forms the backdrop for the storyline here. Katharine Watson, Julia Roberts’ role, is a West Coast come East free spirit as an art instructor at Seven Sisters Wellesley College ready to do battle with old-fashioned views of women and of the traditional art syllabus. The time, the 1950s, seems to be out of another world to an early 2000s viewer brought up on the 1960s idea of the Seven Sisters schools and their Ivy League cohorts as elite bastions of privilege which kept the old elites stocked but also allowed the increasing number of arrivistes to gain the brass ring. Instead the 1950s version of Wellesley is far from the Hillary Clinton (Class of ’69) model of young women ready, willing and able to be President of the United States or to break any other glass ceilings out there.
Art instructor Watson finds plenty of smart girls at the school, book smart as my old friend Pete Markin would say, as to be expected but they are wasting their talents preparing to be the perfect housemate (meaning well-mannered stay at home wives not significant others) for those up the road Ivy League guys who will form the next core of the men in the grey flannel suits come graduation. She also finds a clear class bias among those students taking her course in art history since while the place may or may not have been an upscale “finishing school” in the 1950s they knew she was not a brethren. Did not have the pedigree. The main concern then reflected in a good housekeeping course provided by the school was marriage, suitable upscale marriage, but marriage nevertheless which seems to be all they wanted to discuss including why Miss (now Ms.) Watson was not at the advanced age of 30 married herself.
The battle is on as Ms. Watson tries might and main to get these fact heavy but by the numbers thinking young products of good schools and good families to think outside the box, to appreciate for example post-Impressionist art. As the school year grinds on she make some headway after butting heads with the most conservative girl, Betty, played by Kirsten Dunst, in the little coterie who are featured in the film who if you can believe this actually got married during the school year unsuccessfully as it turned out since she was filing for divorce before the school year was out. (Having gone to college in the 1960s I was astonished that anybody, any undergraduate, would get married during the school year. I do not remember any such person in any of my classes and have asked around and found the same thing. Now of course that is a common sight on college campuses.)
The fight between Ms. Watson and Betty got resolved in Ms. Watson’s favor at least formally. When the question of renewing her contract came up the administration was ready to heave her unless she agreed to several non-negotiable demands which she rejected out of hand and headed to Europe after having made serious inroads with those uppity students. Ms. Watson almost as an afterthought by the scriptwriters had an affair with a philandering male fellow teacher but that is just so much fluff since this is drop dead Julia Roberts after all and not some closet old maid. The heart of the story line here though is a slice of elite women’s college life in the red scare Cold War 1950s when thinking outside the box was more perilous than you might have thought. Maybe even thinking Mona Lisa was not smiling might have been suspect.
The Forces That Wonder
About The Universe Have Grown Shorter By A Head-Physics Made Easy-Kind Of
-Wizard Stephen Hawkings Passes At 76
By Frank Jackman
I have always been
stricken by that commentary by narrator Nick on the last page of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s seminal The Great Gatsbywhere he speculates about an earlier
virgin time in the Long Island Sound where the greatest part of the action takes
place (kind of virgin although Native Americans were plentiful on the ground in
the area). The time when the lusty, thirty, grubbing Dutch sailors saw the land
for the first time which sparked their sense of wonder-wonder at what lay before
them in the new land. Well in the 21st century, 20th too
where he came of age of wonder the discovery of land held fewer sources of
wonder and so the whole universe became the source of wonder, of speculation about
what was ahead for Stephen J. Hawkings who passed away recently at the age of 76 after a very long and tough fight to stay
alive with a rare debilitating condition.
Not silly wonder like
some schoolboy, not the wonder of “alternative facts” and damn lies but the
wonder created by the scientific method which honored, valued, hell lived for
facts AND theories based on hard plausible facts about what made the cosmos
turn the way its turns. Here is the big score, here is where he stood head and shoulders
above many others in the same profession, the same wonder business. Brother
Hawkings made some very tough dollars of facts understandable to those not in
the “fraternity.” Well kind of-okay. Who will take up his standard. For now
though RIP, Brother Hawkings, RIP.
Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Defenders Of The International Working Class-From Our Forebears The Diggers Of The English Revolution-The World Turned Upside Down
A YouTube film clip of Billy Bragg (Known In This Space As Narrator Of Woody Guthrie And His Guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists ) performing The World Turned Upside Down.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere! ******** Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The International Working Class Everywhere! ******** Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule! ******** A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was as high in the American labor force as it is just tentatively recovering from of late, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession 2008 highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. Socially productive work not make-shift stuff although we would support an vast expansion of public works to fix the broken down infrastructure in need of serious and immediate repair. his is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions’ plans as a result of battles like the General Strike in San Francisco in the 1934, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize.
Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections like the unsuccessful one against Governor Scoot Walker in Wisconsin in the aftermath of the huge defeat of public workers in Wisconsin funds and talents which could have been used to reorganize the public workers for union struggles ahead. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008, 2012, and 2016 labor, organized labor, spent over well over 700 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts rather than the serious labor organizing among low wage workers, the unorganized, the South and Wal-Mart the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement since they have been very generous with own paychecks. The old norm in need of revival is that the bureaucrats at all levels should receive no more than the pay of the average skilled worker they represent.
The hard reality today is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. One of most egregious recent examples that we can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor when the deal went down from Bush to Obama to Trump on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio (also think, think hard, about having to go that far back to get a positive example). That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like the Scoot-Walker recall effort in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in previously in Libya and now in Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Chad and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq and other Middle East states we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. No War With North Korea, Iran! Out of Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaigns! Defend The Palestinian People! And as always after 16 long years, since 2001 for the forgetful Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off North Korea!- American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of North Korea and Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partners on this issue, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea) in North Korea or Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of North Korea and Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran and the Kim regime in North Korea in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets and reneged on that promise by going to prison. The jailhouse the only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea preparations, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get our drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those like Trump and the majority of his Republican ilk r his who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion plus dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the 2008 crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble had also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda.
Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to socialism, to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Monday, Sept 3 11:30 to 6 Campagnone Common Lawerence MA
As the region’s only true Labor Day festival, 34th Annual Bread & Roses Heritage Festival is an open-air arts and music festival honoring Lawrence, Massachusetts’ multi-cultural roots and rich labor history while commemorating the most significant event in Lawrence history: the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike. A day of activism and family fun, the Festival boasts 3 stages of socially conscious performances, an array of family activities, rows of community vendors, historical trolley and walking tours, culturally diverse food offerings, educational presentations and more!
HIGHLIGHTS • Historic Trolley Tours: FREE 50 minute tour of the historic mill town, Lawrence, MA. Departs from City Hall every 30 minutes starting at 12:00pm, with the last trolley at 4:00pm. Get TICKETS in advance at the Friends of Lawrence Heritage State Park tent (these fill up quickly).
Los paseos en trolley con guÃa en español salen a las 2:00pm, 3:00pm y 4:00pm. Busque su boleta en la mesa de “Friends of Lawrence Heritage State Park.”
• Historic Walking Tours: FREE. Leaves from the Strikers' Monument on the Common across from City Hall and goes through the mill district, focusing on the Strike of 1912.
• Commemoration Ceremony at 11:30AM at the 1912 Textile Workers' Strikers' Monument across from City Hall. Welcome by the Chair of the 1912 Strikers’ Monument Committee, the President of the Bread and Roses Heritage Committee, and Mayor Dan Rivera <https://www.facebook.com/dan.rivera.716>.
• Celebration of Dreamers and Doers for Social Justice - We will celebrate the accomplishments and ongoing organizing efforts of several local workers’ campaigns.
• “Hustle and Soul”- A group of young, local creatives present an eclectic multimedia production will take festival-goers on a thought-provoking experience to explore the topics of intergenerational struggles, the immigrant/urban experience, and reimagining the future of the City of Immigrants.
• Lawrence History Live! – Historians, workers, and union representatives present their insights into Lawrence's history and today’s workers’ issues and actions in a centrally located speakers’ tent. Lawrence History Live! also includes a Community Forum which offers in-depth discussion of the current housing crisis. Festival visitors are encouraged to participate and contribute their views in a Q&A format. SCHEDULE COMING SOON: breadandrosesheritage.org/lawrencehistorylive <http://breadandrosesheritage.org/lawrencehistorylive>
• Family Activities – Family entertainment includes an international food court, pony rides, walking and trolley tours, a magic show, learn about reptiles, and portrait artist Ed Bray. The highly popular Kidz Zone will feature an eclectic mix of arts and crafts by the Lawrence Arts House <https://www.facebook.com/TheLawrenceArtsHouse/> (La House), a community based expressive arts studio with a therapeutic framework that reclaims art-making as a process for healing. MORE: breadandrosesheritage.org/familyactivities <http://breadandrosesheritage.org/familyactivities>
While you're there check out the poster exhibit at the museum. (3rd one down)
For The Late Rosalie Sorrels- A Working Class Anthem For Labor Day- " Solidarity Forever"
Solidarity forever! For the union makes us strong When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun. Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the union makes us strong. They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom when we learn That the Union makes us strong. In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold; Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old For the Union makes us strong. This labor anthem was written in 1915 by IWW songwriter and union organizer Ralph Chaplin using the music of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic. These song lyrics are those sung by Joe Glazer, Educational Director of the United Rubber Workers, from the recording Songs of Work and Freedom, (Washington Records WR460)
The Baptism Of Fire- Norman Mailer's "St. George And The Godfather" Click on the headline to link to a "The New York Times" obituary for American writer Norman Mailer article, dated November 10, 2007.
COMMENTARY/BOOK REVIEW
ST. GEORGE AND THE GODFATHER, NORMAN MAILER, THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, NEW YORK, 1972
As I recently noted in this space while reviewing The Presidential Papers and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (hereafter, Miami) at one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that Norman Mailer wrote. In his prime he held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition, ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels, like The Deer Park, in his time I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might partially admit, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are what will insure his place in the literary pantheon. With that in mind I recently re-read his work on the 1972 political campaign St. George and the Godfather-the one that pitted the hapless George McGovern against the nefarious President Richard M. Nixon. This work while not as insightful as Miami or as existentially philosophical (except a short screed on the abortion question) or as cosmic as his approach in the Presidential Papers nevertheless only confirms what I mentioned above as his proper place in the literary scheme of things.
As mentioned in those previous reviews Theodore White may have won his spurs breaking down the mechanics of the campaign and made a niche for himself with The Making of a President, 1960 and his later incarnations on that same theme but Mailer in his pithy manner has given us a useful overview of the personalities and the stakes involved for the America in these campaigns. I would also note here that his work on the 1972 campaign represents the efforts of a man deeply immersed in the working of bourgeois politics from the inside. The 1972 campaign however also marked the beginning of new kid on the block ‘gonzo’ journalist Doctor Hunter Thompson’s take on that same process from the outside with Fear and Loathing on the 1972 Campaign Trial. In a shootout Thompson wins this one hands down. Poor Teddy White is over in a corner somewhere, muttering. In Mailer’s defense, as he acknowledged, there was not much to work with in 1972 inside the process and so the only real way to do it was from the outside.
That last statement is kind of an epiphany for my take on these three journalistic works by Mailer. The campaigns of 1960, 1968 and 1972 not only bear commenting on as part of the breakdown of the bourgeois consensus in the last third of the 20th century but represent a parallel personal politic story about my own political trajectory in that period. One clear point that I made in Miami was my undiminished commitment to the defeat of one Richard M. Nixon in the year 1968. As a result I found myself going from critical support for Lyndon Johnson, uncritical adoration for Robert Kennedy and ultimately pounding on doors for Hubert Humphrey. The details of that sorry saga have been commented on in this space last year in Confessions of an Old Militant-A Cautionary Tale. (See archives, October 2006). My main point for reviewing the 1972 campaign is that by that time , although Richard Nixon had not taken himself off my most wanted list and George McGovern was clearly superior to the likes of Hubert Humphrey as an honest bourgeois presidential candidate, I had decisively broken from ‘lesser evil’ politics. Between 1968 and 1972 I had had a socialist ‘conversion’ experience and for me the Democratic Party had become an empty shell. If one takes the time to compare Mailer’s work on the 1968 and 1972 elections one can draw that same contrast between the two without necessarily drawing my political conclusion. In a couple of hundred pages on the campaign 1972 Mailer basically has to make up a story out of whole clothe because the drama on the Democratic side came after the convention with the vice-presidential choice debacle and on the Republican side the convention was so scripted that one could have read the transcripts instead. Again the real action, the real face of the born-again Richard Milhous Nixon came after the convention in the throes of the Watergate explosion.
As I write this commentary it has been 35 years since those conventions and much has politically gone on in that time, mainly for the worst from the perspective of leftist politics. One would think that it is finally time for a shift back to the left. I believe that the right wing has had its time and that indeed the shift is taking place, if slowly. If one seeks to find the genesis for the bad politics of this period then Norman Mailer’s take on these events, as exemplified in the conventional political process, bears close examination. That said, as I noted in the Miami review, and and which bears repeating here, we had better make very good use of any shift to the left and not let the other side off the hook this time. Enough said.
