On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- *"THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LEON TROTSKY" by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova

Click on title to link to Victor Serge's Internet Archives. Serge was an important addition to the international communist movement coming over from the pre-World War I anarchist movement. His political fate at the end is murky, to say the least. What is not murky is his defense of the non-revolutionary actions of Andreas Nin and the POUM in Spain in the course of the revolution there in the 1930's. More later.

BOOK REVIEW

HOMAGE TO A FALLEN REVOLUTIONARY

As far as I know Victor Serge’s biography of Leon Trotsky was the first comprehensive evaluation from a left-wing perspective of the Bolshevik leader’s life and work after his death. From that perspective it is valuable for two reasons. Serge himself was a secondary Communist leader after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and witnessed many of the events described in the book. Moreover, for a long period of time he was a member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition to the rise of Stalinism that formed in the Russian Communist Party and the Communist International in the 1920’s.

Additionally, Serge wrote this book in collaboration with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova who provides many of the personal insights into Trotsky’s life, work and behavior that round out Serge’s historical narrative. This is a task she also performed in Trotsky’s memoir My Life and there is some overlap of the material used. Most importantly this biography fills out the last ten years of Trotsky’s life not covered in his memoir. If a reader wants a rewarding insider’s view of the whirlwind of Trotsky’s life from prophetic rise to leadership to subsequent fall and isolation for his steadfast beliefs I would recommend reading both books.

The main task Serge sets himself here is to place the dramatic and ultimately fateful events of Trotsky’s life in the content of his role in the peaks and valleys of the Russian revolutionary movement from the turn of the 20th century until his assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940. Those included his leadership of the defeated Revolution of 1905, his internationalist fight against World War I, his organizing the October Revolution, his creation of the Red Army in the Civil War against the Whites, his various positions as a Soviet official, the defeat of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition by Stalin and his henchmen and his failure to create a viable leftwing alternate to Stalinist rule in while in exile. Just to summarize these highlights of his career indicates that we are dealing with a very big task and a very big historical figure. Although Serge had broken politically with Trotsky several years before this biography was written he senses this and mainly lets Trotsky’s accomplishments and mistakes speak for themselves.

As I noted in my review of Trotsky’s My Life (see March 2006 archives) many of the events depicted in this biography such as the seemingly arcane disputes within the Russian revolutionary movement, the very real attempts of the Western Powers to overthrow the Bolsheviks by force of arms in the Civil War after the Bolshevik seizure of power and the struggle of the various tendencies inside the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International in the 1920’s discussed in the book may not be familiar to today's audience. Nevertheless one can take the measure of the man from the strength of Trotsky's commitment to his cause and the fight to preserve his personal and political integrity against overwhelming odds. As the organizer of the October Revolution, creator of the Red Army in the Civil War, theorist, orator, writer and fighter Trotsky was one of the most feared men of the early 20th century to friend and foe alike. Today, the natural audience for the book, especially those trying to find a way out of the impasse that the international labor movement as the victim of a one-sided class war finds itself in, needs to critically assess Trotsky’s life and times. This book will help.

********************

Victor Serge 1936

Letter to Leon Trotsky--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Victor Serge, La Lutte contre le stalinisme. Maspéro, Paris, 1977;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

August 10, 1936

Dear Leon Davidovich

Excuse me for not yet having responded to your letter of July 30. I've twice started to and had to stop. I'm overwhelmed with work and don’t know what is what.

And given the fact that despite it all there are no essential disagreements between us (our appreciation of the personal qualities and work capacities of the comrades of RP[1] can’t be considered essential) we can put these subjects off for later. It’s not you that I accuse of sectarianism, but our entire movement. Alas, I think I can prove this very convincingly. But work now permits us to escape from sectarianism! What a shame and even how disgusting it is to see how much paper is blackened concerning the personal chicanery of Molinier, when we haven’t found the means to publish even one pamphlet on our comrades thrown into Stalinist prisons! What! Hundreds of French proletarian comrades know of the disputes about Molinier, but they don’t know the names of Iakovin and Pankratov! This is truly monstrous. But the rising wave of the revolutionary movement will sweep away these monstrosities. Right now something very comforting is occurring. Everyone is rushing to Spain. I just received a desperate letter from Ver[eeken]: all his young people are leaving, they're all en route! He asks that I intervene so that some remain here. I'll try. In Paris it’s the same thing. Two Italian comrades from Marseilles were killed near Saragossa. (And it is again impossible to work; what a filthy article La Lutte Ouvrière dedicated to them.) Rosmer has left. And among the Socialists close to us Collinet. Louzon, too. Anarchists from all over are going there en masse.

It was only after long conversations that I was able to hold back my son (sixteen, he’s quite young). I sent a proposal to the International Secretariat on the subject of the anarchists and the syndicalists. We must ward off the serious conflict which those Spanish Stalinist canaille are mixed up in. Here’s the declaration Hernandez [2] made to the press: “This revolution will be a bourgeois revolution. In no way will it be a social revolution (sic). We'll manage to have done with the anarchists.” (sic, newspaper of August 8). In Barcelona the anarchists killed the Socialist bureaucrat Trillas. Among them those who say: “We're not going to let the Stalinists do whatever they want, we'll kill them first,” are very strong. It’s possible that a civil war will break out in the proletarian ranks! The Spanish anarchists are uncontestably in the majority in Catalonia, an industrial region of decisive importance. Here is the line I propose to choose and the appeal I propose to make:

1. We revolutionary Marxists, considering the reinforcement of the revolution’s rear indispensable, proclaim that the dictatorship of the proletariat must and will mean true freedom for the workers. We will fight along with you in order to assure the freedom of thought and tendencies within the revolution, and solemnly vow to do everything to ensure that no bureaucrat of any color transforms the revolution into a prison of the Stalinist type for the workers.

2. We are partisans of total democracy, and at the same time of total discipline in combat and in production.

3. We consider you anarchists and syndicalists class brothers and devoted revolutionaries and propose to you the maximum collaboration, and at the same time implacable criticism and an ideological struggle in a fraternal atmosphere.

In the name of the IVth International we are the only ones able to speak in this way to the anarchists and the syndicalists. Neither the Socialists like Caballero nor the Stalinists can act in this way. In this we have an immense superiority, which could play a salutary role.

Our press must adopt this line. (The anarchist Ascaso met an exemplary death. Why was our press silent on this! I tried to the best of my ability to repair this error.)

Your last letter leads me to believe that you didn’t receive one of my letters, written by hand in Russian, in which I announced to you that my Soviet citizenship (as well as that of my family) was taken from me, which for the moment prevents me from going to Paris. It would be quite “strange” if this letter were to not reach you. Keep me up to date on this.

I'll go to Paris when I receive the papers allowing me to move around. And I'll come to see you without delay. I'll write you expressly on this subject.

In connection with the events in Spain I proposed to the comrades that they energetically launch the slogan of worker’s control of the army:

1. As a propaganda slogan instituting the duality of powers in the heat of events;

2. And most of all as a propaganda slogan which will permit the unmasking of the adversary and will have the following practical application: every worker will consider himself in the army as a representative of worker’s control and demonstrate a maximum amount of vigilance.

The editor wants me to send him the translation[3] little by little. (I'm pleased by the completely novel way with which you pose the problem of the state. This is a great contribution on the theoretical plain.) I'll wait for your remarks before sending my first batch to the editor.

I strongly and cordially shake your hands, you and N.I.[4]


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnotes
1. La Révolution Prolétarienne, revue founded and Pierre Monatte and edited by Robert Louzon.

2. Jesus Hernandez, leader of the Spanish Communist Party.

3. Translation of the revolution betrayed.

4. Natalia Trotsky.

For Bob Dylan Once More Into The Time Capsule, Part Three- The New York Folk Revival Scene in the Early 1960’s-Phil Ochs

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Phil Ochs performing the classic anti-war song "I Ain't Marching Anymore".

CD Review

Washington Square Memoirs: The Great Urban Folk Revival Boom, 1950-1970, various artists, 3CD set, Rhino Records, 2001

Except for the reference to the origins of the talent brought to the city the same comments apply for this CD. Rather than repeat information that is readily available in the booklet and on the discs I’ll finish up here with some recommendations of songs that I believe that you should be sure to listen to:

Disc Three: Phil Ochs on “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”, Richard &Mimi Farina on “Pack Up Your Sorrows”, John Hammond on “Drop Down Mama”, Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band on “Rag Mama”, John Denver on “Bells Of Rhymney”, Gordon Lightfoot on "Early Morning Rain”, Eric Andersen on “Thirsty Boots”, Tim Hardin on “Reason To Believe”, Richie Havens on “Just Like A Woman”, Judy Collins on “Suzanne”, Tim Buckley on “Once I Was”, Tom Rush on “The Circle Game”, Taj Mahal on “Candy Man”, Loudon Wainwright III on “School Days”and Arlo Guthrie on “The Motorcycle Song”


Phil Ochs on “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”. Phil Ochs wrote the very politic songs that Bob Dylan either ceded to him or that he did not want to write as he went his own way in the musical world. Phil got the notion that some things desperately needed fixing (and still do) and he was the guy to write about them. Except a bad, a very bad thing happened to Brother Ochs. His generation, our generation of ’68, got cold feet when the deal went down and abandoned the struggle to “seek a newer world”. For a political songwriter that is the kiss of death and no more needs to be said. Someday, Brother, we will not be marching anymore. But until then we have to fight the bastards.

I Ain't Marching Anymore
By Phil Ochs

D G C D
Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans
G C D
At the end of the early British war
G C
The young land started growing
G
The young blood started flowing
C Am D
But I ain't marchin' anymore

For I've killed my share of Indians
In a thousand different fights
I was there at the Little Big Horn
I heard many men lying
I saw many more dying
But I ain't marchin' anymore

C G
It's always the old to lead us to the war
C Am D
It's always the young to fall
Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun
Tell me is it worth it all

For I stole California from the Mexican land
Fought in the bloody Civil War
Yes I even killed my brother
And so many others
And I ain't marchin' anymore

For I marched to the battles of the German trench
In a war that was bound to end all wars
Oh I must have killed a million men
And now they want me back again
But I ain't marchin' anymore

(chorus)

For I flew the final mission in the Japanese sky
Set off the mighty mushroom roar
When I saw the cities burning
I knew that I was learning
That I ain't marchin' anymore

Now the labor leader's screamin' when they close the missile plants,
United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore,
Call it "Peace" or call it "Treason,"
Call it "Love" or call it "Reason,"
But I ain't marchin' any more.


There seems to be a variety of opinions about the chords for this song. Since I am not able to judge which is right, I will simply present all of them.

The first set of chords were provided by Dave Miller:

D G C D
Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans
G C D
At the end of the early British war
G C
The young land started growing
G
The young blood started flowing
C Am D
But I ain't marchin' anymore

C G
It's always the old to lead us to the war
C Am D
It's always the young to fall


Jeffrey Shallit tells me that these are the correct chords:
D G C C/B D/A
Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans
G C C/B D/A
At the end of the early British war
G C
The young land started growing
F Em
The young blood started flowing
Am C D
But I ain't marchin' anymore

Am G
It's always the old to lead us to the war
C Em A
It's always the young to fall
C Em
Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun
Am C D
Tell me is it worth it all

Simultaneously, I got a message from James Barnett giving these chords:
G C D
Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans
G C D
At the end of the early British war
G C Am
A young land started growing
F Em
The young blood started flowing
Am D
But I ain't marchin' anymore

C G
It's always the old to lead us to the war
C Em A
always the young to fall
C Bm Em
Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun
C Am D
Tell me was it worth it all


NOTE:

Most of the historical events referenced in this song are probably pretty obvious, with the possible exception of ``United Fruit.'' Further information can be found in the notes to the song United Fruit.

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

In Search Of Heroes Of The Great American Hispanic Night-Mi Hombre Senor Zorro-The ‘Z’ Man Of My Youthful Dreams-Antonio Banderas’s “The Mask Of Zorro” (1998)-A Film Review

In Search Of Heroes Of The Great American Hispanic Night-Mi Hombre Senor Zorro-The ‘Z’ Man Of My Youthful Dreams-Antonio Banderas’s “The Mask Of Zorro” (1998)-A 

Film Review

DVD Review

By Si Lannon

The Mask Of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Anthony Hopkins and assorted sleaze-ball Spanish dons and their senoras and senoritas, 1998

I have made no secret here or in private conversations that in my youth, my childhood really, I was crazy to watch the Zorro half hour on 1950s black and white television. For a reason that only a few people knew then, mostly family, and excluding my corner boys, some of who work for this publication, and whom I grew up with in the heavily working- class Irish and some Italian neighborhood of the Acre in North Adamsville a suburb south of Boston. I suppose every family has its family secrets, its skeletons in the closet like some looney grand aunty up in the batty attic, a brother, a hermano in home speak, who has spent more time in jail for various armed felonies than on the outside, that some cousin was in the vernacular of the day in our family at least was “different” meaning then a “fairy, fag” you know what I mean and today proudly LGBTQ, a young female relative who also in the code words of the day had to travel to “Aunt Emmy” for a while, meaning that she was pregnant out of wedlock and had to leave town to avoid family disgrace and dagger neighborhood dowager grandmother eyes probably never to come back.

In my family the deep dark secret which also reveals in passing why I loved Zorro as my youthful hero was that my mother was a Latina, Hispanic, you know from Mexico whose last name was Juarez, Bonita Juarez. No big deal right, now anyway although in the age of the long knives, in the age of Trump and all the animosities he has helped stir up, bring to the ugly surface of American life, that may no longer be true. But back then, back in 1950s growing up Irish-Italian Acre that was a no-no. The way around it devised by my parents was that sweet Bonita was “passed off” as Italian. An entirely respectable ethic designation in a town that drew Italians back around the turn off the 20^th century to work the granite quarries that dominated the topography of the landscape (that work died out with the exhaustion of the quarries to be replaced by a booming shipbuilding industries which by the 1950s has in their turn faded this time by off-shore outsourcing and eventual departure which explained a lot about the wanting habits of we corner boys in the 1950s while other working class towns were observing something of a golden age-also mainly gone now with globalization). While there were names, derogatory names, for Italians in some Irish working-class homes in the neighborhood there was enough intermixing to level things off.

Almost universally though since there were absolutely no Hispanic families in the whole town the normal terms of abuse applies-spics, wetbacks, braceros, and the like. My father could not stand for that and even his relatives in the neighborhood believed my mother was from Italy. She had come up to California from Mexico during World War II with her family to work the grape and melon fields and my father stationed at Fort Ord at the time met her at a USO dance and wooed her after that. Since Bonita’s English was halting she was forbidden to speak Spanish when others were around. The only way any corner boys knew that she was Spanish was in high school when in ninth grade my best friend Jack Callahan had been taking Spanish and had come to the house unannounced and heard her speaking that language and not Italian. Naturally asking what gives and I told him and from there to the rest of the guys who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. [In the interest of today’s seemingly compulsory transparency statement Jack Callahan has not only occasionally written in this publication but has been a substantial financial backer-Greg Green]

The corner boys when they found out since we were “brothers” today hermanos were pretty cool about the whole thing since she was my mother and that counted a lot even when we were at civil war with them, con madres. In general though it was not until many years later after Bonita passed away that people became aware of her nationality in a time when such things were more openly okay-even in the Acre.                    

Secrets aside I loved Zorro the same way my corner boys loved say white gringo good guys, avenging angels like Wyatt Earp or the Maverick boys from the television our main source outside of the movies for having characters we could identify with. Swashbuckling Zorro taking on all-comers, bad ass gringos especially but also batos locos paid soldiers and other scumbags and of course the oppressor hombres-the mainly Spanish dons who had the huge land grants from the Spanish kings when California was part of the fading Spanish Empire and later after formal independence and creation of a Mexican state who gouged the peasantry into the ground to maintain their freaking luxurious lifestyles. I would have to keep my devotion something of a secret although in general Zorro was a positive figure among the television-watching corner boys.

I was therefore very interested in doing this review of The Mask of Zorro when site manager Greg Green decided that enough was enough as Mexican Nationals, immigrants, citizens, hard-working peoples were being bashed for no good purpose by the Trump unleashed dark alt-right-Nazi-fascist-white nationalist cabal and had to be defended on all fronts including popular culture-including films. And in a very definitive way-beyond the obvious romance between Zorro, played by a youthful Antonio Banderas and his lovely senorita and soon to be marida and madre of his child, Elena, played by drop-dead beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones-this film shows a heroic and honorable side of the Mexican saga-of cultural super-heroes among the oppressed peoples of the world. 

Here is the way the thing worked on this one although one can take the production to task for not have more Hispanics, Latinos, etc. in key roles like Elena, who could have worthily been played by Penelope Lopez, and certainly Zorro, the elder, played by venerable and ubiquitous high-toned Brit actor Anthony Hopkins could have had a better casting. The elder Zorro has a running battle in the Mexican independence struggle with the soon to be departed Spanish viceroy, a real bastard whose name is legion so no need to give him some human surname over the way the peasantry and others were treated by him. More importantly over the elder Zorro’s wife and daughter since that mal hombre viceroy was smitten by her. Eventually the bastard was the cause of the mother’s death and the elder Zorro’s imprisonment leaving the field clear for him to raise that daughter, Elena, when going back to Spain in comfort and culture.    

Then fast forward twenty year later and the bastard returned with Elena and with the idea of turning via those well-off land grant Dons California into an independent republic by stealth and cold hard cash to the Mexican leader Santa Ana, known as a villain in U.S. history via the Alamo and Jimmy Polk’s Mexican War adventure. The war guys like young Abe Lincoln and Henry David Thoreau couldn’t stomach. Enter a rejuvenated elder Zorro who nevertheless was too old to go mano a mano with the bastard and his hired thugs. Through serious trial and error he trained a new generation Zorro, played by Banderas, to lead the struggle against the returned kingpin oppressor and let the peasantry live off the their lands in some peace. Once our new Zorro finished his basic training he was off and running to woo the lovely Elena, tweak the bastard, fight a million sword fights, woo the lovely Elena, fight a few million more sword fights, and well you know the “and” part by now. A most satisfying film which only rekindled my love of the sacred youthful character-thanks young and old Zorro.         

In Search Of Heroes Of The Great American Hispanic Night-Mi Hombre Senor Zorro-The ‘Z’ Man Of My Youthful Dreams-Antonio Banderas’s “The Mask Of Zorro” (1998)-A Film Review

In Search Of Heroes Of The Great American Hispanic Night-Mi Hombre Senor Zorro-The ‘Z’ Man Of My Youthful Dreams-Antonio Banderas’s “The Mask Of Zorro” (1998)-A 

Film Review

DVD Review

By Si Lannon

The Mask Of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Anthony Hopkins and assorted sleaze-ball Spanish dons and their senoras and senoritas, 1998

I have made no secret here or in private conversations that in my youth, my childhood really, I was crazy to watch the Zorro half hour on 1950s black and white television. For a reason that only a few people knew then, mostly family, and excluding my corner boys, some of who work for this publication, and whom I grew up with in the heavily working- class Irish and some Italian neighborhood of the Acre in North Adamsville a suburb south of Boston. I suppose every family has its family secrets, its skeletons in the closet like some looney grand aunty up in the batty attic, a brother, a hermano in home speak, who has spent more time in jail for various armed felonies than on the outside, that some cousin was in the vernacular of the day in our family at least was “different” meaning then a “fairy, fag” you know what I mean and today proudly LGBTQ, a young female relative who also in the code words of the day had to travel to “Aunt Emmy” for a while, meaning that she was pregnant out of wedlock and had to leave town to avoid family disgrace and dagger neighborhood dowager grandmother eyes probably never to come back.

In my family the deep dark secret which also reveals in passing why I loved Zorro as my youthful hero was that my mother was a Latina, Hispanic, you know from Mexico whose last name was Juarez, Bonita Juarez. No big deal right, now anyway although in the age of the long knives, in the age of Trump and all the animosities he has helped stir up, bring to the ugly surface of American life, that may no longer be true. But back then, back in 1950s growing up Irish-Italian Acre that was a no-no. The way around it devised by my parents was that sweet Bonita was “passed off” as Italian. An entirely respectable ethic designation in a town that drew Italians back around the turn off the 20^th century to work the granite quarries that dominated the topography of the landscape (that work died out with the exhaustion of the quarries to be replaced by a booming shipbuilding industries which by the 1950s has in their turn faded this time by off-shore outsourcing and eventual departure which explained a lot about the wanting habits of we corner boys in the 1950s while other working class towns were observing something of a golden age-also mainly gone now with globalization). While there were names, derogatory names, for Italians in some Irish working-class homes in the neighborhood there was enough intermixing to level things off.

Almost universally though since there were absolutely no Hispanic families in the whole town the normal terms of abuse applies-spics, wetbacks, braceros, and the like. My father could not stand for that and even his relatives in the neighborhood believed my mother was from Italy. She had come up to California from Mexico during World War II with her family to work the grape and melon fields and my father stationed at Fort Ord at the time met her at a USO dance and wooed her after that. Since Bonita’s English was halting she was forbidden to speak Spanish when others were around. The only way any corner boys knew that she was Spanish was in high school when in ninth grade my best friend Jack Callahan had been taking Spanish and had come to the house unannounced and heard her speaking that language and not Italian. Naturally asking what gives and I told him and from there to the rest of the guys who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. [In the interest of today’s seemingly compulsory transparency statement Jack Callahan has not only occasionally written in this publication but has been a substantial financial backer-Greg Green]

The corner boys when they found out since we were “brothers” today hermanos were pretty cool about the whole thing since she was my mother and that counted a lot even when we were at civil war with them, con madres. In general though it was not until many years later after Bonita passed away that people became aware of her nationality in a time when such things were more openly okay-even in the Acre.                    

Secrets aside I loved Zorro the same way my corner boys loved say white gringo good guys, avenging angels like Wyatt Earp or the Maverick boys from the television our main source outside of the movies for having characters we could identify with. Swashbuckling Zorro taking on all-comers, bad ass gringos especially but also batos locos paid soldiers and other scumbags and of course the oppressor hombres-the mainly Spanish dons who had the huge land grants from the Spanish kings when California was part of the fading Spanish Empire and later after formal independence and creation of a Mexican state who gouged the peasantry into the ground to maintain their freaking luxurious lifestyles. I would have to keep my devotion something of a secret although in general Zorro was a positive figure among the television-watching corner boys.

I was therefore very interested in doing this review of The Mask of Zorro when site manager Greg Green decided that enough was enough as Mexican Nationals, immigrants, citizens, hard-working peoples were being bashed for no good purpose by the Trump unleashed dark alt-right-Nazi-fascist-white nationalist cabal and had to be defended on all fronts including popular culture-including films. And in a very definitive way-beyond the obvious romance between Zorro, played by a youthful Antonio Banderas and his lovely senorita and soon to be marida and madre of his child, Elena, played by drop-dead beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones-this film shows a heroic and honorable side of the Mexican saga-of cultural super-heroes among the oppressed peoples of the world. 

Here is the way the thing worked on this one although one can take the production to task for not have more Hispanics, Latinos, etc. in key roles like Elena, who could have worthily been played by Penelope Lopez, and certainly Zorro, the elder, played by venerable and ubiquitous high-toned Brit actor Anthony Hopkins could have had a better casting. The elder Zorro has a running battle in the Mexican independence struggle with the soon to be departed Spanish viceroy, a real bastard whose name is legion so no need to give him some human surname over the way the peasantry and others were treated by him. More importantly over the elder Zorro’s wife and daughter since that mal hombre viceroy was smitten by her. Eventually the bastard was the cause of the mother’s death and the elder Zorro’s imprisonment leaving the field clear for him to raise that daughter, Elena, when going back to Spain in comfort and culture.    

Then fast forward twenty year later and the bastard returned with Elena and with the idea of turning via those well-off land grant Dons California into an independent republic by stealth and cold hard cash to the Mexican leader Santa Ana, known as a villain in U.S. history via the Alamo and Jimmy Polk’s Mexican War adventure. The war guys like young Abe Lincoln and Henry avid Thoreau couldn’t stomach. Enter a rejuvenated elder Zorro who nevertheless was too old to go mano a mano with the bastard and his hired thugs. Through serious trial and error he trained a new generation Zorro, played by Banderas, to lead the struggle against the returned kingpin oppressor and let the peasantry live off the their lands in some peace. Once our new Zorro finished his basic training he was off and running to woo the lovely Elena, tweak the bastard, fight a million sword fights, woo the lovely Elena, fight a few million more sword fights, and well you know the “and” part by now. A most satisfying film which only rekindled my love of the sacred youthful character-thanks young and old Zorro.         

Mix and Mingle Among The Mayfair Swells-Jane Austen’s “Love and Friendship” (2016)-A Film Review

Mix and Mingle Among The Mayfair Swells-Jane Austen’s “Love and Friendship” (2016)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Love And Friendship, starring Kate Beckindale, Xavier Samuel, based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen, 2016

Damn my old friend and former colleague at American Film Gazette Sam Lowell whom I replaced as film critic at this site although occasionally writes some “think” pieces now that he is no longer under any deadline. His damnation centers on the tendency that he had when he got interested in a type of film or an author/writer and do a “run” based on that interest (still does so when writing about film noir which he been doing a slow moving “run” B-grade noirs on recently). Over the many years I have known him I also seemed to have picked up the habit. The habit in the present case being taking a “run” at various films based on Jane Austen’s novels and other works after having viewed the film The Jane Austen Book Club. Well we are going down that trail once again with the film adaptation of her early work Lady Susan using the title of another Austen work Love and Friendship.     

The scheme in Book Club was to take a modern book club membership and develop the plot of the film around the similarity of relationships among them to those in Austen’s six major novels. No question that one Jane Austen was an astute observer of the social mores and ethos of the later 18^th century, early 19^th century English country gentry, a strata of society which if it didn’t have the prestige of the upper nobility nevertheless owned the vast tracts of land and controlled the doings of the Parliament in those days that made the kingdom work. Here dear Jane looks at the mating rituals of that country gentry whose members were always in the end driven by the need to avoid dropping down the social ladder. That is most definitely the concern of the lead character Lady Susan, played by Kate Beckindale, whose aim is just that desire to avoid dropping down in her circumstances-and because inheritance is everything just look at the obtuse Common Law provisions that of her daughter.      

    

Let the games begin. Bring a scorecard. Lady Susan is on the rebound having been tossed out of one manor for going toe to toe with the lord of said manor. So off she goes to the country estate of her brother-in law and wife with her lady companion to see what she can dig up to restore her diminished sources. Before long she has that brother-in-law’s wife’s brother, Reginald played by Xavier Samuel, eating out of her hand despite himself (despite knowing that she is in modern language a “tramp”). But his/their father said no way, forget it. Still that brother is not so easy to convince of milady’s sullen sooty character and things look like he will be snagged.

Then all hell breaks loose Lady Susan as it turned out was still going toe to toe with that randy lord and his wife found out about it through a letter delivered by Reginald. The long and short of it is that Lady Susan was forced to call off her relationship with promising Reginald although that is not the last we will see of him. Enter Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica along with a goof companion Sir James Martin. Once Reginald sees Frederica they quickly become an item and goof Sir James is left empty-handed. Well not quite since on the rebound and fiercely committed to her own cozy future she picks up Sir James. All’s well that ends well. With this scenario it is a wonder that Britain was able to rule the world for as long as it did. Hey, what do you think maybe it was because of it.           

Tales Of The Lakota Queen-The Time Navajo Jack Caught The Westbound Freight

Tales Of The Lakota Queen-The Time Navajo Jack Caught The Westbound Freight   

By Seth Garth

Hi, Ace of Diamonds here, my on the bum moniker, real name Jim Mahoney. I just got the word a few days ago that the near-legendary master hobo Navajo Jack (sorry, never knew his last name, or his real last name the reason which will become obvious below) had caught the West-bound train. That is hobo-bum-tramp speak for passing away, dying. How I know that expression I gathered from first- hand experience when I was on the bum back in the 1970s after my first divorce which got  a big hand from my  drug and money problems which the “ex” couldn’t deal with any longer after I spent the mortgage payment one month on an few ounces of nose candy, of sweet cousin cocaine and she threw me out or I took off depending at this far remove on whose story you want to believe. At the time we were living in Oakland out in California (funny to say these days because we couldn’t afford upscale San Francisco and now Oakland is getting beyond reach for the same kind of people as us back then). I was also in hock to about fifteen other people so I decided to scram, to head out on the road, to go underground really, to go to a place where repo men, dunners and a couple of guys with turned up out of joint noses who worked from a drug dealer I was in hock to big time, and the United States Post Office couldn’t find me with the three dollars in my pocket and a green small backpack with all my worldly possessions in it.

Yeah, the big idea was to go to a place where nobody cared about I.D, about what your past was about or your last address. Of course never having been on the bum before I wasn’t sure where to go. That is not exactly right I had been thrown out of the family house a few times as a young kid when my mother couldn’t handle what she called “one more disgrace” but that was kid’s stuff. Then I would go to the church for refuge but having lost the faith, having lapsed as they say in the Catholic Church that was the last place I wanted to go, especially in unknown California. I headed to the Sallies, to the Salvation Army where if you gave them a “story” they would put you up for a few days. That is exactly what I did once I saw that almost any hard luck story would do. They just wanted a story to cover themselves that you would go the straight and narrow, be contrite. At least while you were under their protection. So I headed to the Mission District, told my story and got my three days and three squares.

That is where I first met Boston Brownie whose first name I do know but will keep quiet about just in case anybody is looking for him for any reason. Still despite time and sunnier days I still remember the rules. Most of which he taught me that first Sally experience. Brownie had confused me when he introduced himself since I thought he was from Boston although he was really from Albany and was using Boston as a cover. I had told him that I was from Riverdale not far from Boston and he told he had slept near the Sudbury River not far from my growing up home one time when he was East. That was the night he told me never tell to say where you were really from, or your name, since you never knew who might cut your throat for that information, meaning if somebody was looking for you they would have a source to go to. I went by the moniker Vegas Vick until one night out in a jungle camp south of Westminster in Southern California while playing five-card stud with Saw Mill Jefferson I kept drawing the Ace of Diamonds and thereafter was christened Ace of Diamonds.  

In any case after our stay, my stay was up at the Sallies me and Brownie decided or rather he decided and I went along to hit the road. By the way it was Brownie who clued me in to the fact that at the Sallies as long as you were sober, or appeared sober, could get extensions of your stay especially if you had an earnest story and demeanor. (When I found those “later and sunnier times” anytime, now even, the Sallies sent a request for donations I would ante up so there is some kind of equity in this transaction between us even if they are unaware of the connection.) I wound up staying about two week, kept sober, got some day labor money and paid close attention when Brownie would tell me various hustles like where to get free lunches on the church soup line circuit, some clothes beyond my crusted old stuff and how to hit the church social welfare circuit to get five, ten, twenty dollars to “get on your feet” with a half decent sob story. 

I didn’t have to embellish mine much since that divorce, the drugs and a general line of patter about a new start got me over the line. The only thing that Brownie yelled at me about was that day labor work which he said was beneath his dignity, his dignity as a hobo. That was when he gave me the word on the differences, recognized differences among the road brethren, between the low-level bum who basically refused to work living almost exclusively on hand-outs, the tramp who would work any kind of job from dishwasher to fruit-picker mainly to keep himself in wine and cigarettes and the kings of the hill, the hoboes who kept the hobo jungles in order and who only worked when there was some worthwhile job, not cheapjack day labor. Anybody, or almost anybody, was welcome at least for a while in any hobo camp but that hierarchy as I would come to see definitely existed.     

I had read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road as a younger man and so I was kind of thrilled that we would be heading out on what I thought was the hitchhike road. Maybe meet some females looking for male companionship, maybe not. (The curse of the hitchhike road then whenever I chanced to travel that way when too far from the freight tracks was not the later mass murderer roaming the highways looking for easy victims but what we called the “perverts” guys who were cruising looking for other guys, homosexuals, who if you said no would dump you off the side of the road like I was one time out in Winnemucca in the Nevadas.) That hitchhike stuff was crazy Brownie laughed the only way to travel was on the freights where you could make better time avoid lots of road hassle and local on the look-out cops (although overall the railroad bulls, cops were more of a hassle than any civilian cops except when trying to sleep in their parks or places like that.) Brownie’s plan was to head south since this was late September when we started and as you headed East if you went through the Rockies you could run into snow and cold weather trouble as early as early October.  We went south to L.A. on a Union Pacific spur then headed East on the grand old Southern Pacific. That first trip out I would have bet everything I had that hitchhiking was better but I will admit Brownie was right that to get where you are going that freight system is the way to go.

As I have already mentioned along the various railroad tracks that crisscross the country there are hobo camps, jungles, where the brethren can find kindred, a safe flop and a not fit for everybody meal at least. The camp at Gallup, New Mexico was where I met the legendary Navajo Jack who Brownie kept telling me about and hoped would be at Gallup when we arrived. Naturally the stories about so-called legendary guys on the road center on survival prowess, beating back the bulls and cops and the ability to jump any freight that comes your way. Nothing big by real world standards but big in that world. Navajo had that reputation but also one as a guy who would not think twice about cutting another guy if he crossed him or crossed some young kid (more likely tried to rape the kid) or crossed some friend. But mainly the legend was about his ability to run the rails, to see that mystical starlight on the rails. When I did get to meet him I was all ears to what he had to say. (Brownie and he had traveled together when both were younger, when Navajo was working the freights trying to get out of the fucking Dakotas and that reservation life.)

But enough about me and my travels which in the hobo-tramp-bum road book were rather short (even including the hitchhike trail) since once I headed East that last time and settled in Boston for real and opened up a small print shop, got remarried and took on those sunnier days I went off the road. Navajo never did as I would hear occasionally from Brownie (when he finally went off the road after almost getting a leg severed trying to jump a freight that was moving too fast for him).          

This time that I found out about Navajo Jack’s demise  I had run into Boston Brownie in the Boston Common as I occasionally do when I am downtown for some reason and noticed that he was sitting on a bench that I have seen him sit on a million times over the years. Since the days when he stopped trying to catch freight trains because he just couldn’t do it anymore. (I had given up that mode of transportation many years before that and had gone back to the nine to five grind which proved easier than being on the bum-most hobos, bums, tramps would disagree and who is to fault them.) Sometimes I would stop and give him a ten-er or whatever I had in my pocket and talk for a while. Sometime not either because I was in that nine to five rush or because he was in his cups, his high wino heaven moment.

That day though Brownie was coherent, and I had money in my pocket, so I sat down next to him and talked a bit. That is when he mentioned that he had heard from somebody else that Navajo had passed away, hell, some things, some terms die hard, had caught that West-bound train. Brownie didn’t know exactly how Jack ended although it was on the bum, on the road since the party who informed Brownie said Navajo had passed some place in Illinois on the Lakota Queen and had been found one morning face down a short distance from the tracks near a hobo “jungle” and somebody had called the coppers to get him out of there. (“Hobo jungle” a place usually a short distance from the side of a railroad track, or under a bridge, along a river bank if there no train tracks where the travelling people as they say in Ireland can find kindred, find some food, some hellbroth stew usually no culinary expert could cook up,  some warmth of the eternal fire some protection of sorts from railroad “bull,” railroad cops, or local cops as long as they decided  not to bust the operation up and, maybe, some camaraderie although that sometimes could be iffy as I knew from first-hand experience when old-timers did not welcome young guys into their club.)    

Well at least Navajo didn’t die in his bed, didn’t die in his native South Dakota a place from which he was always running away from. Died running the Lakota Queen which is the name Navajo gave to every train he ever hopped a ride whether it was the Washington and Ohio, Union Pacific or Southern Pacific. Needless to say it was never an Amtrak passenger train every true hobo scorned out of hand. That running away something that I could relate too then, maybe now too on full moon nights when I get a craving for being on the road, for being free from the nine to five drag that I would bitch and moan to Brownie about when he was not in his cups. The times I talked to Navajo we would always start with -where you running away from this time. Funny Navajo didn’t even want to carry his name, his traditions at a time when I knew him American Indians were becoming “Native Americans” and later “Indigenous peoples” for despite his moniker he was half Lakota, half white if you can fathom that.  

Yeah Navajo Jack was Lakota Sioux and I think he said Welsh, but he hated that former fact, hated that he had grown up on a dingy South Dakota reservation just as I had grown up in that Riverdale mill town about forty miles west of Boston. Told me he had tried out various names Hopi Hank, Raging Apache and the like but after going through Navajo country somebody had tagged him with the name and it stuck. Funny though from the first day, or rather night I met him out in Gallup, New Mexico, out at the hobo jungle right outside of town not far from the Southern Pacific tracks he called every train the Lakota Queen, so who knows what was going through his mind at any given time about running away from his past. A lot of guys had names for the freights, usually after some love that had faded long ago or had been run away from and regretted. I always thought Navajo was running the same thoughts in his head when he rode every train west or east. Some squaw his term, some Phoebe Snow we called it around some flame-flickered campfire.     

Navajo was maybe ten, fifteen years older than I was. Had been on the bum, been on the road for maybe ten years then, had been on that road every since he got out of the service, out of the Army after hell-hole duty in Vietnam which he said he would never get over, not about the killing but about the lies the government, the white man’s government had told him via the recruiting sergeant about what was going on over there. Made sure he didn’t put down roots anywhere, left no forwarding address for nothing nowhere the way he said it. I always liked being around Navajo, he got me out of a few jams, kicked my ass a few times when he let the whiskey get to him, but always will be in my book one of the royalty of the road, of the hobo kingdom.

Funny, as I left Brownie that forlorn day when I found out about Navajo I almost said that he had “cashed his check.” I stopped myself when Brownie gave me a   wicked look and then said, “sorry Navajo that you wound up catching that West-bound freight.” Brownie smiled as if to say that he now knew that I would always remember the rules of the road. 

Armies Of The Night, Oops, Armies Of The Day- The October 21, 2018 Women’s March On The Pentagon-Another Sam Eaton And Ralph Morris Story From The Archives

Armies Of The Night, Oops, Armies Of The Day- The October 21, 2018 Women’s March On The Pentagon-Another Sam Eaton And Ralph Morris Story From The Archives

By Frank Jackman

 

Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton have never been skimpy about doing things for the cause, the cause for them some peace in this wicked old world, some end to the endless wars their county, their America is embroiled in, leading to wicked out of whack U.S. military budgets that are wasteful and wanton. It was not always like that for this pair-they were as patriotic as any other 1960s citizen having in Ralph’s case served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam during the hellish times in 1967 and 1968. Sam Eaton not thinking much about the war since he had a serious childhood leg deformation and therefore was militarily unfit had his sad epiphany when his best friend Jeff Mullins had sent him a letter begging him that if anything happened to him in Vietnam to tell everybody who would listen to oppose the damn war against peasants who were fighting for their land and independence and we had no rationale quarrel with them.

Ralph had come back from Vietnam without any illusions about what he had done, what he had watched others do to people he had no quarrel with and Jeff Mullins had not returned from the war. This unlikely pairing despite both being from serious working-class backgrounds and hence tight in some matters met in the field of fire down in Washington, D.C. on May 1971 where they “met” in Robert Kennedy Stadium  not for a professional game but having been rounded up  in a police sweep on the streets when they were among thousands who had decided to up the ante and try to shut down the government if it would not shut down the war. Those were desperate times for anti-war advocates, Ralph ha gone down there with a contingent from Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) from the Albany area. The area where he grew up and Sam had come down with a cohort of radicals from Cambridge near where he grew up in Carver (at one time the cranberry bog capital of the world he would tell everybody who would listen.      

That meeting, better meeting of the minds would last until this day through thick and thin. Both men had raised families and that had curtailed their activities somewhat over the years. They would not meet sometimes for extended periods of time but they always felt a bond that time and distance would not, could not break. Ralph had joined Veterans for Peace in the early part of the 21^st century and Sam had joined as an associate so a lot of the events they went to were under the black and white dove-etched flags of that organization. As they had come of retirement age, Ralph turning over the high end electronics business his father had started to his youngest son and Sam’s his printing business over to a trusted employee they had become if anything more active as the times demanded their efforts what with endless wars, bloated military budgets and cuts in necessary social programs rocking the country well beyond even the most egregious acts of the Vietnam War governments. Ralph would make Sam laugh when he suggested that they buy a condo in Washington they were down there so much lately back in June around the Poor Peoples Campaign.

That endless war, endless increase in the military budgets and the endless cuts in social programs (and add in general boorishness of the governments of late) made them prime subjects for any event that would highlight those issues. During the summer of 2018 they had seen during one march or other an advertisement calling for a women’s march on the Pentagon in October. Actually the exact days of the 1967 actions, October 20^th and 21^st. The call issued by antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan. The combination of the name Cindy Sheehan and March of the Pentagon sent flashes through their minds. Cindy Sheehan whatever her subsequent trajectory, not all for the better, earned a lot of “street cred,” an important characteristic to them when she almost single-handedly revived the peace movement, the anti-Iraq opposition when that war turned into another long-term American military quagmire when she “camped out” down at George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas back in 2005-2006 looking for answers to one question-why was her son killed in Iraq when there was no rational reason to have gone into that benighted country in the first place since there were no weapons of mass destruction on the premises. That got a lot of peace activists, including Ralph and Sam, back on track after a period of quiescence after the invasion was started despite mass opposition. No, forget “back on track” shamed them back onto the streets. Her name alone was enough for them to make plans.  

Sam, the reader and writer of the pair, although Ralph had plenty of ideas in his own right and on those occasions would do himself proud with whatever “think piece” he would put together, had been indifferent to the anti-war movement as mentioned before in 1967 and of course Ralph had been in Vietnam then so neither for their respective reasons had been involved in the original march on the Pentagon that year. Sam had actually later read Norman Mailer’s account of his part the action, his self-serving part in the award-winning Armies of the Night and despite some of Mailer’s over the top language in explaining the course of events had at that point wished he had been part of the action which included many acts of civil disobedience when got those, including Mailer himself,  a taste of federal or local justice. (This “later” after Sam had, and Ralph too their own fair share of arrest for acts of non-violent civil disobedience.)

When the pair discussed the up-coming action they knew, given the marginal condition of the active anti-war/peace movement that there would be no literati like Mailer, Dwight MacDonald from Partisan Review and a fistful of other writerly types. No glitterati like William Sloane Coffin and Doc Spock, they of draft resistance fame for which they would stand trial. And no known heavy politicos like Allan Ginsberg OMing the building to the mist of mind, Abbie Hoffman “levitating” the place or even left-liberal types and if things of late ran true to form despite a deluge of press releases no mainstream press (although they knew from Boston/Albany/New York City/ Washington D.C. experience there would be plenty of student journalists sent by their professors to hone their skills on the cheap to people talking to like Ralph and Sam who had learned that talking “to the kids” would hone their own interviewing skills at least giving some pithy line worthy of the mainstream press-if they had bothered to show up. The long and short of it was that this pair were pumped to go do battle against Moloch on its terms and see what came of it.

Only to be for one of the few times in their long and sometimes lonely anti-war careers disappointed or rather perplexed at what had been so promising but which was by any standard a bust. There would be no blame placed, although some scuttlebutt placed blame on the lack of organization, lack of a united front with other peace and social action groups beyond Ms. Sheehan’s name, lack of proper publicity and lack of dramatic effect. Both men had come down by plane from Boston, gone were the days when they would think nothing of the ten hour drive from either Albany or Boston, think nothing of having to go through or around bitch New York City traffic, think nothing of sleeping on church floors sleeping bag in hand, think nothing of the gruel provided for food, thinking nothing of no sleep for three days running of necessary. But poor bladders, poor eyesight, poor energy levels and a little sense that bourgeois flight was not so bad for the soul after all that had made that previous mode of travel outmoded. Even the million bus rides were out for those same reasons.

The plan of action was for the “masses” to meet at Pentagon City Metro stop which Sam knew from previous trips down was the perfect place to meet to head to the Pentagon a mile or two away. But that meeting spot should have also rung bells in their ears because no way would the place take a mass march. And it didn’t since perhaps three or four hundred, at the outside five, people showed up before the noon starting time (which for one of the few times in anti-war march history actually did go off around that time-both men thinking that fact amazing). (By Sam’s count there between police and military far more of them than demonstrators which is a sad commentary on the state of the peace movement as refracted trough this event. The march route was fairly short by Washington march standards but the route, the Sunday-driven route, meant that there would be nothing but empty parking lots that ring the building to greet the crowd. In the event the march ended at the North Parking lot and the dwindling crowd ( a “choir” crowd so once the march was completed there was drift since the line-up of speakers and performers in the vast empty parking lot, mercifully though with a sizable number of port-a- johns for the AARP-worthy crowd was not enough to hold those who had heard it all before) heard what they expected to hear from anti-warrior veterans and performers.

If this was to be the jump-off to a new revived anti-war movement like the 1967 Pentagon march had been this did not go down well with two long-time activists. If this was that start-please have mercy.  They left the place late that afternoon scratching their heads searching for answers-no doubt about that hard fact