Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200^th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts 

A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source  2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21^st century on the 200^th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/

By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).

Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.     

Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.

That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”

My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.     

(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views  pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.        

Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.

Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19^th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20^th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.

To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.             

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth -Horace Pippin

As The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth -Horace Pippin  

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 of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets and other cultural figures. 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 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.

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European Youth -Otto Dix

As The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European Youth -Otto Dix  

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 of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets and other cultural figures. 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 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

Once Again Despite The Tweeter Firestorm-In Honor Of The 150th Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A Book Review-Of Sorts

Once Again Despite The Tweeter Firestorm-In Honor Of The 150^th Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A Book Review-Of Sorts  

Book Review

By Alden Riley

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, Roberts Brothers, 1868

I have to admit I am a bit exasperated over the “firestorm” from Twitter and other sources over my original book review honoring the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women which I just found out has been made into a yet another film adaptation for a modern 21^st century audience far removed from the semi-nomadic existent back in the day before cellphones and Facebook. Sometimes you just can’t win in any quarters that is for sure. I wouldn’t mind if the prairie fire came from one comment but even side issue stuff raised some ire. Jesus. First, I mentioned- “I thought things were supposed to change around here with the changing of the guard, otherwise known at least among the younger writers as the purge and exile of the previous site manager Allan Jackson and his replacement by Greg Green after a bitter internal fight with no holds barred and no prisoners taken in the fall of 2017.”

Although as a free-lancer, a stringer I did not have a decisive vote in the vote of no confidence that replaced Allan Jackson, in the interest of the seemingly obligatory statement of transparency an old friend of some of the writers here from high school and anti-war Vietnam War soldier days, with Greg I do know from various sources, reliable sources, that among the younger writers their actions were seen as a fight to the death. That Allan had to go, that Greg had to take over the whole site manager operation and that a guiding hand Editorial Board had to be established so one person could not wield an iron hand over the whole operation in the future. All of this over the to me pretty harmless policy decisions of Allan to spent plenty of time in 2017 and 2018 commemorating the 50^th anniversaries of the many historically important events of that era beginning with the Summer of Love, 1967. 

At some point, maybe rightly if the extent of coverage projected by Allan is any indication the younger writers ire, who like myself at best knew of those events second or third hand rebelled, got some aid from old-timer Sam Lowell, also an old friend of Allan’s from high school days who decided it was time to “pass the torch” they were able to remove Allan from his post. According to Sam Lowell, who after all as “the father we never knew” of the rebellion should know, the talk around the water cooler was to fight to the finish, to sent Allan packing, no regrets. So now readers who have a partisan interest in defending the actions of the younger writers are up in arms arguing that their “gentile” actions were merely to force Allan to retire. I am done with the silly issue and Sam has agreed to reply to anybody who still feels that terms like “purge” and “exile” were exaggerations of what went on.      

Next up in the batting order a simple statement about Greg’s early stewardship and the pitfalls of following a legendary figure at this publication like Allan Jackson after his purge and exile-“Then Greg, I think to show he was his own boss, his own operator came up with the silly, silly even to Will Bradley who originally presented the idea before thinking better of it, that to appeal to a younger, eventually non-existent audience, that the publication would feature film reviews of Marvel/DC comic book characters gone to screen, serious analysis of rap and current pop music, and review graphic novels. …”

I came on board shortly before this change of leadership while Greg was handling the day to day operations and Allan was making policy decisions, so I had a chance to see what Greg was trying to do to make his own mark, to become his own legend here just as he had been for many years over at American Film Gazette. In the beginning of the Green regime through Senior Film Editor Sandy Salmon I was getting some very good films, books, and music to review. Assignments like the Hammer film noir series pitting my take against Seth Garth’s, commemorating the various anniversaries of books like The Great Gatsby that had heretofore been staples of the Western literary canon and all kinds CD reviews from classic rock to world music.

Then the world caved in. Somehow Greg thought that what was needed to spruce up the publication, to appeal to a younger audience in the 21^st century rather than the hard-core Generation of ‘68 devotees who have sustained this publication since their own youths back in hard copy days through the current on-line version was to review comic book character films, video games and such, and rap and techno-music in its various mutations. A bad decision which even Greg knew was true as he retreated back to some more civilized material. The blow-back from readership was this seemingly orchestrated sycophantic echo about how I was being too hard on Greg for a momentary mistake, a good faith effort to reach a new audience, to try something new and that it had been,  and I will quote from one irate tweet “bad taste” to bring up that serious error of judgment now that Greg has righted the ship. Ho hum. 

I certainly have been around long enough in the publishing business now to know how to weather such storms but the next “fire storm,” really a tempest in a teapot to quote Sam Lowell on some internal controversy, a one- man crusade really was too much. Here is what I “wrongly” said- “Then Allan Jackson whom we all though had perished, gone to pot, dope pot, was working for Mitt Romney out in Utah Mormon country, running a whorehouse with an old flame in East Bay or living with an old former hometown corner boy turned “out” drag queen in San Francisco depending on which rumor you believed at the moment, showed up to do a series of encore presentations of material he had produced over the years in order to get back that older audience which had sustained the publication through good times and bad.”

Of course, the one-man crusade was one Allan Jackson, now a contributing editor doing encore presentations at this publication under the good graces of his old friend Sam Lowell and Greg. Apparently Allan does not have Greg and Sam’s good graces and let the whole shady rumored past year or so go to ground. No sooner had he seen my comments that he ripped out a few thousand word “essay” on my “libelous” statements concerning his whereabout after he got that proverbial boot in 2017. If anybody, and I worry about what you have been doing with your precious time if you have, has not seen Allan’s encore presentation introductions which are as self-serving as anything I have seen of late then a brief summary of his slights is in order. Under Allan’s tutelage all rumors were allegedly untrue or half-truths (a nice dodge when you are on the defensive, especially those unfamiliar with the intentionality rule in libel cases to tar the writer that scurrilous “half-truth” tag).

Allan didn’t try to weasel out of what everybody knew was true, that he had been purged and gone into exile like a beaten cur. Gone far away to try to “rebrand” himself where he was not well known. What he has argued, unconvincingly, is that he merely went West to seek work after he had been “blackballed” by some phantom network emanating from this publication along the East Coast. I have recently been given by our legal department five affidavits from publishers in New York and Boston who almost overnight after hearing of Allan’s untimely, their common term, ouster offered him jobs with increases in salary and less responsibility just to have his name on the masthead (and not on some other publication and mercifully not on ours). He allegedly needed money for his various ex-wife alimonies and the onerous college tuitions for his slew of good kids still in the higher education pipeline and has declared (at the notoriously accurate office water cooler) that no East Coast publisher would touch him with a ten- foot pole. In an age of the casual off-hand lie this is a whooper.   

We can dismiss the Mitt Romney press agent rumor out of hand since I looked at the archives for 2008 and 2012 and noted that Allan had skewered him and his white underwear fetish, his inability to keep to one single answer for more than ten minutes before flipping earning the sobriquet “Mr. Flip-Flop,” and his undying hatred for those who have not gouged the populace and not emulated his scorched earth policies at Bain Enterprises. At least I thought I could discount that rumor until I found out from Sam Lowell, who knows Allan like a book, when he went up to Olde Saco, Maine to offer Allan that Encore Presentation gravy job, that he told Sam that when he had landed in Salt Lake City out in the Utahs he approached the editors of the Salt Lake Tribune for a job to tide him over for a while. Here is the totally cynical part when you think about it. He intended to use that position to springboard himself onto Mitt’s campaign when he announced he was running for the U.S. Senate seat ancient Orrin Hatch was vacating. That is neither here nor there job-wise but his “pitch” was that since he had been an expert skewer of Mitt he would be the perfect guy to deflect any hard-ball stuff that those unruly ruffians might throw Mitt’s way. Yeah, cynical is right.

A man, any man, any woman for that matter has the right to have an affair with whoever they want and not have it published throughout the land. The rumor about Allan running a whorehouse, a high-end whorehouse for high-end Asian businessmen with a kinky streak, for a taste for a walk on the wild side, with an old flame, a woman who goes by the name Madame La Rue whose real name I have known for a while but will stick with her alias since my beef is with Allan not her was essentially true. From “an unnamed but reliable source who has asked to remain anonymous since he or she is not authorized to speak publicly about the matter” I found out that Allan landed in Half Moon Bay south of Frisco, the site of Madame’s house of ill-repute as Fritz Taylor put it in his ironic tone with the clothes on his back and not much else and Madame lend him a bunch of money, so-called lent him the money. Back in the day and I am not sure if it was before they split or after Allan (while still married to wife number two) had fronted Madame the dough to buy an old worn-out mansion on the shoreline, fix it up, grease some palms and other start-up costs-with no strings attached and no requirement to pay back. Nice, very nice. So Madame was just paying back that unrequired pay-back. That is the public story-the real story is that Allan acted as “master of ceremonies” at the place to earn his keep. I don’t know about you but that sounds an awful like pimp to me. Frankly I think Madame got the worse of the bargain for her outlay but I will keep mum about that since I am told they had started up their old torch while he was there before she booted him out for some unexplained reason.

Seth, Jack Callahan (who has done yeoman’s service funding this publication in the dark red ink days), Si Lannon, Sam, all Allan’s friend, his corner boys from the old Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville had the usual pre-Stonewall “fag” “light on his feet,” ‘fairy” vocabulary and social distain before they got enlightened about LGBTQI matters. The one person who I have not put in that mix but who was in the thick of the gay-baiting of certain people (and of each other as well accepted ritual in those hard macho days) is Timmy Riley. Timmy Riley who maybe as a defense mechanism of his own preferences suppressed himself as long as he was in the Acre, and before Stonewall at what cost we will never know. Timmy though turned into Miss Judy Garland, a drag queen, who subsequently has run the famous drag queen club in Frisco for many years. What people did not know was that Allan at some point when Timmy was down in the streets lend him the money to buy the Kit Kat Club in North Beach and from there he zoomed along to fame and fortune. So the story-the public story is that after Madame threw Allan out he went to Timmy with some sad tale and Timmy lend him some money. (All of this money supposedly to pay that damn alimony and those blood-sucker colleges, Allan’s expressions). The real story is that Allan, while living above the club in one of Timmy’s spare rooms declared himself “master of ceremonies” downstairs at the club. Yeah, right we can read between the lines.            

Remember boys and girls all these critics of my review have said not word one about the impact, or lack of impact, of the Ms. Alcott’s book on me, or the world of literature. And before I mention what they have said, or not said there is yet another firestorm they had been more than happy to enflame. This is the offending section-“The only thing I knew about Louisa May Alcott, and this second-hand through Sandy Salmon when he was Senior Film Editor and I was his associate editor was that her father, Bronson Alcott, was a wild man, had run amok at Brooks Farm, the holy of holies in the pre-Civil War Transcendentalist movement, you know Emerson, Thoreau and other Buddha-like figures who ran around Cambridge, mainly Brattle Street telling naked truths naked. Bronson has run through whatever dough he had from his inheritance and had fathered, some say illegimately, a bunch of children by various female denizens of that isolated farm including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife and had had an affair with Herman Melville’s brother. Such things are hard to pin down but all I know for sure is that he claimed Louisa May and three other young women as his children. Lacking DNA testing who knows. So old Bronson was a certified wild man no doubt…”

I need not stand on the silly defense that the information I got about the old wild man Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s beloved if looney father, was gathered from Sandy Salmon, my boss. I refer the reader, and especially those readers who have decided out of some serious naivete to defend this lout, Sol Sandburg’s classic and some say definitive book on Bronson Alcott and the whole Brook Farm ménage In The Time Before Hippie Times; The Brook Farm Commune. Reading the book made even my jaded ears ring. Sure there were serious things going on in the ante bellum period in America, up in cold New England where the least of it was that they stopped believing in the eternal Father, Son, Holy Ghost trifecta, stopped believing in God if you really delve into the Universalist doctrine without flinching. Started a whole movement called if you can believe this the Transcendentalist movement which let’s face it would draw as many wooly-headed minds as intellectual giants like Thoreau and Emerson. The streets of Cambridge were filled with cranks con-men and drifters of no repute who were ready to listen to anybody except maybe Martin Van Buren about how to break out of the nine to five rat-trap circa the 1840s.

This mayhem was a perfect foil for a flake like Bronson Alcott (who also had several aliases to cover his various bigamous marriages both before Brook Farm and after so when I pose the question of who were actually Bronson’s prodigy I wasn’t blowing smoke although the four Alcott sisters, including literary Louisa May, seen to have been his legitimate daughters-all others including the bastard raised by Nathaniel Hawthorne are different stories). No money, no standing, no anything yet he was able in those odd times to ingratiate himself with a ton of intellectual heavyweights and eventually have a soft landing at Brook Farm where he literally went amok, went crazy with laudanum, morphine, hemp (what we call marijuana), opium anything coming off the China sea Yankee clippers that could be ingested. Had those two billion affairs and whatever number of children and walked away with not so much as a by your leave when the place folded due to corruption, malfeasance and general hubris. Some say he was later kept by a woman who ran a whorehouse next to the Parker House in Boston since he was so dope-addled that he was unemployable and needed whatever alms would provide for the children he would claim as his own. A shabby, shabby man and Sol Sandburg nailed the bugger, put him in the deadbeat hall of fame. This is the guy all those irate tweeters have been defending unto death for the sake of Louisa May’s reputation. But enough.  

Like I said a minute ago nothing about the fucking book, not word one about what to their young impressible lives and I can only conclude, male or female, these tweeters have had nothing better to do with their time that throw cyberspace bombs my way to cover the very hard fact that except for an occasional Seven Sisters Lit major nobody has read the book since about 1960, maybe 1950. That said, that truth uttered why did nobody bother to froth-mouthed respond to my take on the book’s place, or non-place, in the expanded Western canon. In the interest of completeness I will retail what I have written previously in the forlorn hope somebody might pick a real literary fight in L.M. ‘s defense:    

“Here is where things get weird though Sandy who knew Allan Jackson when they both were much younger and had worked the free-lance stringer racket we all go through before getting our so-called cushy by-lines at American Film Gazette asked him what sources I should go to for a look at the lingering influence of the book on modern girls and young women. Told Sandy to tell me to ask my sister, Ellen, when she had read the book and what she had thought of it. Here is the honest truth Ellen had never heard of the book, didn’t know who or what I was talking about and when I told her the outline of the story she laughed, smirked and laughed again saying “are you kidding” who had time to read such old-time melodramas. Failing that avenue I figured that I would work my way back so I mentioned the book I was reviewing to my mother who told me that my grandmother had read her the book at night before bed but she didn’t remember much except there were four sisters who grew up and got married or something like that and were good wives except one who died young of some strange disease. She said ask my grandmother. Bingo. Grandma quoted me chapter and verse without hesitation until I asked how the book influenced her. She told me those were different times, more restrictive times even against her growing up times in the 1930s so she would have to pass on the influence question. She was only a little shocked that my sister knew nada about the book and my mother only a little more. So I am going to take a stab and say as a 150^th anniversary honor-women you have come a long way since those homebody marriage child-rearing times.  

I had to think awhile, had to ask Seth Garth who is good at this kind of question and his old flame Leslie Dumont, both fellow writers here what was it about the novel that would have appealed to young girls and women up at least until my grandmother’s growing up times. And why when I later asked some other female contemporaries they came up as blank as my sister on even having heard of the book. Leslie said it best, or at least better. Those were male dominated times and so even the least amount of spunk, independence by say Jo, who is the character in the book who pretty much represents Louisa May’s profile was like a breath of fresh air even to young girls and women who knew the score, knew they would be driven back into the cave if they got too brave. Seth, who was more than willing to defer to Leslie’s judgment took a more historical approach saying there was nothing in the plotline that dealt with eternal truths so that such a novel would have a limited life-span except in the groves of academia where a couple of generations of Ph.ds could get worked up about the social meaning of it all.  

That is about it except to briefly trace the story line, or lines since there are actually two main threads, the almost universal family-centered expectations for women and Louisa May’s struggle to get somebody to survive into strong independence co-managership of the family along with a thoughtful husband. Oldest sister Meg is pretty conventional, beautiful and domestic preaching to the younger sisters’ choir about the need to be civilized and good God-fearing wives. Jo, Louisa May’s character is strong-willed and thoughtful and will make the marriage that Alcott thought should be appropriate for her times and class (and the unspoken truth was to end the shameful lusts and lechery of one Bronson Alcott). Beth is something of a cipher, musical but early on sickly who died young from the after effects of horrible scarlet fever so no real lesson can be drawn from her life. (Funny how these Victorian novelists, male and female, have to have some frail sickly female character hovering in the background.) Amy, the youngest, is the closest to the character that let’s say my daughter could relate to if she ever finished reading the book which she adamantly refused to finish after reading about a third of it and declaring the thing  utterly boring even the Amy character who struggle for artistic self-expression is very similar to her own feelings about what she wants out of life. As Sam Lowell has stated on many occasions-a slice of life circa the 1860s-that is the “hook.”      

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Last Year Of World War I Continues (Remember The War To End All Wars) ... Some Remembrances

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Last Year Of World War I Continues  (Remember The War To End All Wars) ... Some Remembrances

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  

The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges not honored by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. Also decisive although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International although not for long), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experience in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of progressive capitalism, and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as the sinkhole trenches of Europe are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war) and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “club fed” and ran for president in 1920 out of his jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                   

Over the next period as we continue the last year of the long night of the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.      

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 –David Bomberg

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 –David Bomberg

By Seth Garth

A few years ago, starting in August 2014 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.