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Friday, October 05, 2018
Thursday, October 04, 2018
Veterans for Peace: Ring Church Bells on Armistice Day
Veterans for Peace: Ring Church Bells on Armistice Day
8/9/2018
Veterans for Peace is calling on churches to ring their bells at 11 AM on Sunday, November 11 - Armistice Day - in recognition of the futility of war and to show our commitment to world peace.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the original Armistice Day, a day of celebration marking the end of fighting during World War I (the Great War). Today, Armistice Day is a call to Americans, in recognition of the horrors and futility of that war, to rededicate themselves to world peace.
While November 11 was declared Veteran's Day in 1954, Armistice Day legislation (1919; 1926 and 1938) remains in place to this day. Read excerpts from that legislation here.
Veterans For Peace (VFP) is an international organization made up of military veterans, military family members, and allies dedicated to building a culture of peace, exposing the true costs of war, and healing the wounds of war. Their goal is to change public opinion in the U.S. from an unsustainable culture of militarism and commercialism to one of peace, democracy, and sustainability. They do this primarily, although not exclusively, through grassroots organizing and education at the local level.
Learn more about the organization Veterans for Peace, or the local chapter, Smedley Butler Brigade. Contact Doug Stewart, VFP Chapter Leader in Boston and member of the Eliot Church of Newton, a Mass. Conference church, here.
Ring your Bells on November 11!
Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings
Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings
For Jack's month Ocotber in the sweating rains
By Jeffrey Thorne
Beat down, beat around, beat sound, beat to the ground. Fuck it Jack just jumped into it from his beautified beatified skull, maybe thinking of youthful skull behind some bushes or out on some back road highway jumping the bones of some friend’s only, but really and truly jumped from some river of life, mill town life like a million guys before him and now in foreign lands a million guys after him, the river flowing to steam up some engine to grind the fabric that will clothe the world. Ha, like we who come naked into this holy coil can take solace from that low catholic trip it took him, and not just him but lots of others who broke the square habit at least for a time, for the youth duration. Damn beatitude in the end when all the shouting was over and Jack in some drunken grave why couldn’t he have listened to that guy out in Frisco town, the guy, a kid really, who all nervous on bennie nevertheless blew that high white note that was in his DNA, provide by grandma like everything else out to the fucking China seas. But that was at the end. At the beginning hell no said Jack.
The world wasn’t big enough to hold all his desperations, keep them in check, keep those wanting habits every poor boy has inside him talk about DNA. Even rama jamma Buddha didn’t have no cure for that except maybe some jimson and jetsam and mystical balm for a shattered world. Like I say that was at the end though. At the beginning our boy took off as fast as he could from that mill town river and never looked back (except to take the dust off his shoes and bow down before our Lady of the river when luck ran out, the booze ran out, hell, the sweet tea sticks ran out). Took it on the lam, went west east south north (I think on that last direction maybe back to the homeland, back to the stinking big river up north that some earlier Jack crossed to get to that fucking mill river, Jesus, looking for the holy grail, looking for about six ways to get out of that beat down, beat around, beat sound, beat to the ground bitch stuff. Took up with some fat fast mad monk who spouted stuff about negro streets, crazies and Moloch devouring the land, the land of milk and honey, rama rama, went to the mat (secret in more ways than one with that loose bastard who couldn’t keep his mouth shut or cock in his pants -and that was that-for a time (no, not then that street wise New Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with the language and ladies’ pocketbooks or that highbrow junkie hanging around New Orleans looking for quick fixes although they qualified if it came to that).
For a time no question since the pull of fast fat monks could wear off fast under the sun of boze, booze, bennies and grand simon. Took his hat off and let the world slip in-thought maybe the way was the way. Startled guys like desolation angels and dharma bums into thinking they could do what had never been done like some lead pipe cinch. Ran up the mountain (no Prometheus Adonis more likely who was to know) to place incense in the fatted calf body singing, singing, singing some cross between the stations of the cross and plastic nirvana (just to be cute, cute as a nine thieves). Saw Siva run the river gauntlet and leave satiated beyond compare, saw Rama too walking down Post Street in his nightshirt. Then fame got in his way, this is poor boy wanting habits Jack we are talking about remember in case you have lost the drift. Make him surly and brazen wondering why the hell if fame was fame didn’t it jump out at him when he started on his Calvary Road road, started out in dirty sneakers and crusted blue jeans, and when he jumped out of his skull and fled that mountebank river town. Fools and jesters following his every move, hiding in bushes and make that fat monk look like some holy fool, like a goof (again remember please not that street-wise New Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with language and ladies’ pocketbooks). Ah, sullen lost planet life.
How was he to know, how was Jack to blessed know that his illegitimate children, not child, children would abandon their flea-etched sins and follow the pied piper. Follow the brethren saint mad man with the wooly beard and the incense announcing his arrival at the table singing, singing, singing and it wasn’t hosannas but some odd unspoken tune which ripped across the land for a while. Drew magnetic forces around themselves and expected the kingdom to last until end times. Hah, Jack could have given them the word on that little mistake. I am the light Jack thought and then he faded from the scene into utter darkness those unwashed, unloved, unspoken for illegitimate children to lay waste to the desert for forty years. Jesus
As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Continues -The Anti-War Resistance Builds –The Russian Revolution Breaks The Logjam
As The 100th
Anniversary Of World War I Continues -The Anti-War Resistance Builds –The Russian Revolution
Breaks The Logjam
The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War
before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers
and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense
of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow
down the flower of European and in some cases colonial youth from all classes)
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 had all the earmarks of a bloodbath
early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts
(as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various
“small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19th
century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other less
lethal forms of industrial production).
Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather
thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings
were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own
capitalist-imperialist nation-state
against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the
Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists,
Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of
the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and
their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20th
century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that
clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some
much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.
Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like
Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser
capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of
most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting
stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first
international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915,
the famous Zimmerwald conference, one wag pointed out that they could all fit
in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be
over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of
international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple
white-crossed graves dug in the vast bone-crushed cemeteries that marked the
nearby battle fields too numerous to mention). You see, and the logic is
beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was
built for peace-time but once the cannons roared then the “big tent” needed to
be folded for the duration. Jesus.
Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first
months of the second year of the war 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 the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to
send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre 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 under the sway of the powerful German party although not
for long because “Long Live The Communist International,” a new revolutionary international, would
become the slogan and later order of the day in the not distant future),
architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many
revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19th century (including
forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future
communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world
imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist
sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism
was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned
into its opposite at this dividing point in history), 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
1914 turned to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death
trap for the flower of the European youth.
Lenin also has a "peace"
plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate
eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done
from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the
beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international
working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first
year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be
good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing
would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those
beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace
“scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German
soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking
trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer
before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as
an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns
around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things
around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has
suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)
Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn
the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the
war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced
thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole
trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as 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 as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one
nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20th
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
range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by
the norms of the last wars. 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 the damn thing 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 as being
on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of
left-wing revolutionaries and not just them), 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), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and
the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the
truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran
for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary 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 when 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. Even my old anti-war
amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the
Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the
madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper
war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty
of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with
him).
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. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.
So imagine in the hot summer of 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
long night of the 100th anniversary 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 first frenzied shots were
fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places
like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over
the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the
battlefields.
Is There a Way to a Just Peace?
Published: First published in Pravda No. 75, June 20 (7), 1917. Published according to the Pravda text.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 25, pages 55-56.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and C. Farrell
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive. 2000 You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. • README
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 25, pages 55-56.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and C. Farrell
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive. 2000 You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. • README
There is: through a workers’ revolution against the capitalists of the world.
Russia today is nearer to the beginning of such a revolution than any other country.
Only in Russia can power pass to existing institutions, to the Soviets, immediately, peacefully, without an uprising, for the capitalists cannot resist the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.
With such a transfer of power it would be possible to curb the capitalists, now making thousands of millions in profits from contracts, to expose all their tricks, arrest the millionaire embezzlers of public property, break their unlimited power.
Only after the transfer of power to the oppressed classes could Russia approach the oppressed classes of other countries, not with empty words, not with mere appeals, but calling their attention to her example, and immediately and explicitly proposing clear-cut terms for universal peace.
“Comrade workers and toilers of the world,” she would say in the proposal for an immediate peace. “Enough of the bloodshed. Peace is possible. A just peace means peace without annexations, without seizures. Let the German capitalist robbers and their crowned robber Wilhelm know that we shall not come to terms with them, that we regard as robbery on their part not only what they have grabbed since the war, but also Alsace and Lorraine, and the Danish and Polish areas of Prussia.
“We also consider that Poland, Finland, the Ukraine, and other non-Great-Russian lands were seized by the Russian tsars and capitalists.
“We consider that all colonies, Ireland, and so on, were seized by the British, French and other capitalists.
“We Russian workers and peasants shall not hold any of the non-Great-Russian lands or colonies (such as Turkestan, Mongolia, or Persia) by force. Down with war for the division of colonies, for the division of annexed (seized) lands, for the division of capitalist spoils!”
The example of the Russian workers will be followed inevitably, perhaps not tomorrow (revolutions are not made to order), but inevitably all the same by the workers and all the working people of at least two great countries, Germany and France.
For both are perishing, the first of hunger, the second of depopulation. Both will conclude peace on our terms, which are just, in defiance of their capitalist governments.
The road to peace lies before us.
Should the capitalists of England, Japan and America try to resist this peace, the oppressed classes of Russia and other countries will not shrink from a revolutionary war against the capitalists. In this war they will defeat the capitalists of the whole world, not just those of the three countries lying far from Russia and taken up with their own rivalries.
The road to a just peace lies before us. Let us not be afraid to take it.
Notes
Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx-From The Archives- The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx-From The Archives- The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
Workers Vanguard No. 1134
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18 May 2018
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
(Quote of the Week)
May 5 marked the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. The excerpts below are taken from the beginning and conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, a seminal work that Marx co-wrote with his lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes....
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat....
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers....
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
In Honor Of The 150th Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A Book Review
In Honor Of The 150th
Anniversary Of The Publication Of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1868)-A
Book Review
Book Review
By Alden Riley
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott,
Roberts Brothers, 1868
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. The idea was
to let the younger writers spread their wings, learn to fly and not do dreary
pieces like the 24/7/365 1960s nostalgia hippie revival regime under
Jackson. And for a while there was a
breath of fresh air around the place, around the formerly hostile water cooler
which drives the social life of many operations and this one is no exception.
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 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 pop music, and review
graphic novels. Over the top silly stuff
since that phantom audience wouldn’t touch a high-brow publication if they were
paid to do so and even then it would be Seth’s six, two and even that would rouse
them. They get their ideas, information, style elsewhere.
We younger writers in our turn
rebelled at that fantastic imposition and Greg retreated mostly gracefully
under the blowback and let us do our own thing. 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. Invited by Greg via old geezer Sam Lowell and the Editorial
Board. Something has happened to Greg since Allan’s return, maybe he is under
the Svengali influence of the man but now we are all expected to write “outside
the box” meaning material that we know damn little about and could care even
less about. Hence I have been assigned to do a book review of Louisa May
Alcott’s Little Women in honor of the
150th anniversary of its original publication.
There is where things have gone awry
with Greg’s I am sure Allan-inspired approach. 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 but that was hardly enough knowledge to help ‘the hook” of this
famous book which in its time was a best-seller and a standard for young girls
and young women’s bedside reading.
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 saying “are you kidding” who had time to read such old-time
melodramas. Failing there 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 150th 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. Beth is something of a cipher, musical
but early on sickly who dies 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.”
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