This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
This weekend, border officials attacked people seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border—including children and toddlers—with tear gas.1 This comes just after the Trump administration issued an order authorizing troops at the border to use deadly force against families.2
Sign the petition to reject the White House's illegal order authorizing troops to hurt or kill those simply seeking safety and asylum at the border.
This is one of the most horrific things the Trump administration has ever done. Active-duty troops authorized to shoot people seeking refuge at the southern border not only terrorizes migrant families, it erodes our rule of law and makes service members political pawns. This is not just terrifying; it's illegal, and we cannot allow it to happen.
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Veterans For Peace members have spent the last few weeks working diligently to speak out against the deployment of active duty troops to the border. Check out this video!
Over the last few weeks, many of our members traveled to Nogales to participate in the annual SOA Watch: Border Encuentro. Executive Director Michael McPhearson and Robert Vivar of the Unified U.S. Deported Veterans both spoke eloquently at the rally in Nogales. And the Veterans For Peace Deported Veterans Workshop was jam packed!
While there, many took the opportunity to distribute the flyers that VFP created to the surrounding bases. (Check them out here and here) One member even went onto the base, using his privilege as retired military and handed them out right in the canteen to members eating!
Our chapters in Tijuana and Baja have been working around the clock to support asylum seekers that are resting in their community. They have been helping to gather and distribute clothing, blankets and other goods to the caravan. They also have been working hard to challenge the bias that exists towards the caravan in Tijuana and encourage support for the refugees.
The San Diego chapter participated in a march to the border gates to protest the increased militarization. VFP President Gerry Condon was interviewed live on MSNBC during the Sunday rally at the border in San Ysidro. And members across the country have been speaking out and writing letters to object to the militarization of the border and to using illegal chemical weapons on those seeking aid.
Write Letters to the Editor speaking out against the use of chemical weapons and the deployment of troops. (You can check out our statementsfor ideas on language!)
Additional solidarity actions at the border are being discussed. Let us know if you might be able to join a vigil of veterans and other human rights activists at the border or in your home town. Email Gerry Condon at gerrycondon@veteransforpeace.org
When The King Of Rock And
Roll Held Forth In The Acre Section Of North Adamsville -In Honor Of The
Generation Of ’68-Or Those Who Graced Wild Child Part Of It -On That Old
Hill-Billy Down In The Hills And Hollows Come Saturday Red Barn Dance Father
Moment
By Zack James
[Zack James has been on an
assignment covering the various 50th anniversary commemorations of
the year 1968 (and a few in 1967 and for the future 1969 which is to his mind
something of a watershed year rather than his brother Alex and friends
“generation of ‘68” designation they have wrapped themselves around) and
therefore has not graced these pages for a while. Going through his paces on
those assignments Zack realized that he was out of joint with his own
generation, having been born in 1958 and therefore too young to have been
present at the creation of what is now called, at least in the
demographical-etched commercials, the classic age of rock and roll. Too young
too for any sense of what a jailbreak that time was and a shortly later period
which Seth Garth who was deep into the genre has called the ‘folk minute
breeze” that ran rampart through the land say in the early 1960s. Too young as
well to have been “washed clean,” not my term but Si Lannon’s since I am also
too young to have been aware of the import by the second wave of rock, the acid
rock period. Hell, this is enough of an introduction to re-introducing the
legendary writer here. Lets’ leave it as Zack is back and let him go through
his paces. Greg Green, site manager]
Alex James was the king of
rock and roll. Of course he was not really the king, the king being Elvis and
no last name needed at least for the bulk of those who will read what I call a
“think piece,” a piece about what all the commemorations of events a million
years ago, or it like a million years ago even mentioning 50 or 60 year
anniversaries, mean. What Alex was though was the conduit for my own musical
experiences which have left me as a stepchild to fiveimportant musical moments, the birth of rock
and roll in the 1950s, the quick prairie fire called the “folk minute of the
early 1960s and the resurgence with a vengeance of rock in the mid-1960s which
for brevity’s sake call “acid” rock, along the way and intersecting that big
three came a closeted “country outlaw moment” initiated by father time Hank
Williams and carried through with vengeance by singers like Willie Nelson,
Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings, and Muddy Waters and friends blues as
the glue that bound what others who write here, Sam Lowell, in particular calls
the Generation of ’68- a seminal year in many ways which I have been exploring
for this and other publications. I am well placed to do since I was over a
decade too young to have been washed over by the movements. But that step-child
still sticks and one Alex James is the reason why.
This needs a short
explanation. As should be apparent Alex James is my brother, my oldest brother,
born in 1946 which means a lot in the chronology of what follows. My oldest
brother as well in a family with seven children, five boys and two twin girls,
me being the youngest of all born in 1958. As importantly this clan grew up in
the dirt- poor working- class Acre, as in local lore Hell’s Acre, section of
North Adamsville where my mother, under better circumstances, grew up and
remained after marrying her World War II Marine my father from dirt poor
Appalachia which will also become somewhat important later. To say we lacked
for many of the things that others in that now seen “golden age” of American
prosperity would be an understatement and forms the backdrop of how Alex kept
himself somewhat sane with music although we didn’t even have a record player
(the now ancient although retro revival way to hear music then) and he was
forced when at home to “fight” for the family radio to get in touch with what
was going on, what the late Pete Markin his best friend back then called “the
great jailbreak.”
A little about Alex’s
trajectory is important too. He was a charter member along with the late
Markin, Si Lannon, Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Allan Jackson, the later four
connected with this publication in various ways since its hard copy start in
the 1970s, of the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys. These guys, and maybe it
reflected their time and milieu, hung out at Tonio’s for the simple reason they
never had money, or not enough, and while they were not above various acts of
larceny and burglary mostly they hung around there to listen to the music
coming out of Tonio’s to die for jukebox. That jukebox came alive in maybe
1955, 1956 when they first heard Elvis (and maybe others as well but Alex
always insisted that he was the first to “discover” Elvis in his crowd.)
Quickly that formed the backdrop of what Alex listened to for a few years until
the genre spent a few years sagging with vanilla songs and beats. That same
Markin, who the guys here have written about and I won’t, was the guy who
turned Alex on to folk music via his desperate trips to Harvard Square up in
Cambridge when he needed to get out of the hellish family household he dwelled
in. The third prong of the musical triad was also initiated by Markin who made
what everybody claims was a fatal mistake dropping out of Boston University in
his sophomore year in 1967 to follow his dream, to “find” himself, to go west
to San Francisco for what would be called the Summer of Love where he learned
about the emerging acid rock scene (drugs, sex and rock and roll being one
mantra). He dragged everybody, including Alex if you can believe this since he
would subsequently come back and go to law school and become the staid
successful lawyer he is today, out there with him for varying periods of time.
(The fateful mistake on the part of Markin stemming from him dropping out at
the wrong time, the escalation of the war in Vietnam subjecting him later to
the draft and hell-hole Vietnam service while more than the others unhinged him
and his dream.) The blues part came as mentioned as a component of the folk
minute, part of the new wave rock revival and on its own. The country outlaw
connections bears separate mention these days.
That’s Alex’s story-line.
My intersection with Alex’s musical trip was that one day after he had come
back from a hard night at law school (he lived at home, worked during the day
at some law firmas somekind of lacky, and went to law school nights
studying the rest of the time) he went to his room and began playing a whole
bunch of music starting I think with Bill Haley and the Comet’s Rock Around The Clock and kept playing
stuff for a long time. Loudly. Too loudly for me to get to sleep and I went and
knocked on his door to get him quiet down. When he opened the door he had on his
record playerJerry Lee Lewis’s High School Confidential. I flipped out.
I know I must have heard Alex playing this stuff earlier, but it was kind of a
blank before. Background music just like Mother’s listening to 1940s stuff on
her precious ancient RCA radio in the kitchen. What happened then, what got me
mesmerized as a twelve- year old was that this music “spoke” to me, spoke to my
own unformed and unarticulated alienation. I had not been particularly
interested in music, music mostly heard and sung in the obligatory junior high
school music class, but this was different, this got my hormonal horrors in
gear. I stayed in Alex’s room listening half the night as he told me above when
he had first heard such and such a song.
Although the age gap between
Alex and I was formidable, he was out the door originally even before I knew
him since at that point we were the only two in the house all the others in
college or on their own he became something of a mentor to me on the ins and
out of rock and roll once I showed an interest. From that night on it was not
just a question of say, why Jailhouse
Rock should be in the big American Songbook but would tell me about who or
what had influenced rock and roll. He was the first to tell me about what had
happened in Memphis with a guy named Sam Phillips and his Sun Record label
which minted an extraordinary number of hits by guys like Elvis, Warren Smith,
Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee. When I became curious about how the sound got going,
why my hands got clammy when I heard the music and I would start tapping my
toes he went chapter and verse on me. Like some god-awful preacher quoting how
Ike Turner, under a different name, may really have been the granddaddy of rock
with his Rocket 88 and how obscure
guys like Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner and Willie Lomax and their big bop
rhythm and blues was one key element. Another stuff from guys like Hack Devine,
Warren Smith and Lenny Larson who took the country flavor and melted it down to
its essence. Got rid of the shlock. Alex though did surprise me with the thing
he thought got our toes tapping-these guys, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Buddy
Holly and a whole slew of what I would later call good old boys took their
country roots not the Grand Ole Opry stuff but the stuff they played at the red
barn dances down in the hills and hollows come Saturday night and mixed it with
some good old fashion religion stuff learned through bare-foot Baptists or from
the black churches and created their “jailbreak” music.
One night Alex startled me
while we were listening to an old Louvain Brothers song, I forget which one maybe
Every Times You Leave, when he said
“daddy’s music” meaning that our father who had come from down in deep down in
the mud Appalachia had put the stuff in our genes. He didn’t call it DNA I
don’t’ think he knew the term and I certainly didn’t but that was the idea. I
resisted the idea then, and for a long time after but sisters and brothers look
at the selections that accompany this so-called think piece the whole thing is
clear now. I, we are our father’s sons after all. Sons welded by twelve
millions unacknowledged ties to those lonesome hills and hollows where the coal
ruled and the land got crummy before its time and Saturday brought out red barn
fiddles and mandolins an stringed basses with some mad monk calling the tune
and the guys drinking home-made hooch and the girls wondering whether the guy would
be sober enough to dance, hell, to ask for the last dance something out of a Child ballad turned Appalachian mud by the
time it got to the sixth generation fighting the land. Knew that they were
doomed even if they could not appreciate in words their fate unless something like
World War II exploded them out of their life routine like it had Dad when Pearl
Harbor sent him Pacific War bound and then up north to guard some naval depot
near North Adamsville toward war’s end. Alex knew that early on I only grabbed
the idea lately-too late since our father he has been gone a long time
now.
Alex had the advantage of
being the oldest son of a man who also had grown up as the oldest son in his
family brood of I think eleven. (Since I, we never met any of them when my
father came North to stay for good after being discharged from the Marine after
hard Pacific War military service, I can’t say much about that aspect of why my
father doted on his oldest son.) That meant a lot, meant that Dad confided as
much as a quiet, sullen hard-pressed man could or would confide in a youngster.
All I know is that sitting down at the bottom of the food chain (I will make
you laugh if you too were from the poor the “clothes chain” too as the
recipient of every older brother, sister too when I was too young to complain
or comprehend set of ragamuffin clothing) he was so distant that we might well
have been just passing strangers. Alex, for example, knew that Dad had been in
a country music trio which worked the Ohio River circuit, that river dividing
Ohio and Kentucky up north far from hometown Hazard, yes, that Hazard of legend
and song whenever anybody speaks of the hardscrabble days of the coal mine
civil wars that went on down there before the war, before World War II. I don’t
know what instrument he played although I do know that he had a guitar tucked
under his bed that he would play when he had a freaking minute in the days when
he was able to get work (which was less frequently than I would have guessed early
one until Alex clued me in that non-job time meaning that he spent every waking
hour looking for work and had no time for even that freaking minute to play
some fretted guitar).
That night Alex also
mentioned something that hit home once he mentioned it. He said that Dad who
tinkered a little fixing radios, a skill learned from who knows where although
apparently his skill level was not enough to get him a job in that industry,
figured out a way to get WAXE out of I think Wheeling, West Virginia which
would play old country stuff 24/7 and that he would always have that station on
in the background when he was doing something. Had stopped doing that at some
point before I recognized the country-etched sound but Alex said he was
spoon-fed on some of the stuff, citing Warren Smith and Smiley Jamison
particularly, as his personal entre into the country roots of one aspect of the
rock and roll craze. Said further that he was not all that shocked when say
Elvis’s It’s All Right Mama went off
the charts since he could sense that country beat up-tempo a little from what
Smith had been fooling around with, Carl Perkins too he said. They were what he
called “good old boys” who were happy as hell that they had enough musical
skills at the right time so they didn’t have to stick around the farm or work
in some hardware store in some small town down South.
Here is the real shocker,
well maybe not shocker, but the thing that made Alex’s initial so-called DNA
thought make sense. When Alex was maybe six or seven Dad would be playing
something on the guitar, just fooling around when he started playing Hank
Williams’ mournful lost love Cold, Cold
Heart. Alex couldn’t believe his ears and asked Dad to play it again. He
would for years after all the way to high school when Dad had the guitar out
and he was around request that Dad play that tune. I probably heard the song
too. I know I heard Come All You Fair and
Tender Ladies from the original Carter family or one branch of it. So,
yeah, maybe that DNA business is not so far off. And maybe, just maybe, over
fifty years later we are still our father’s sons. Thanks, Dad.
The selection posted here
culled from the merciful YouTube network thus represents one of the key pieces
of music that drove the denizens of the Generation of ’68 and their
stepchildren. And maybe now their grandchildren.
[Alex and I had our ups and
downs over the years and as befits a lawyer and journalist our paths seldom
passed except for occasional political things where we were on the same
wavelength like with the defense of Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning
(formerly Bradley). Indicative though of our closeness despite distance in 2017
when Alex had a full head of steam up about putting together a collective
corner boy memoir in honor of the late Markin after a business trip to San
Francisco where he went to a museum exhibition featuring the seminal Summer of
Love, 1967 he contacted me for the writing, editing and making sure of the
production values.]
On June 3, 2017, NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for providing a media organization with a single five-page top-secret document that analyzed information about alleged Russian online intrusions into U.S. election systems.
Reality, who has been jailed without bail since her arrest, has now been sentenced to five years in prison. This is by far the longest sentence ever given in federal court for leaking information to the media. Today, she is being transferred from a small Georgia jail to a yet-unknown federal prison.
Several months before her arrest, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey told President Trump that he was (in the words of a subsequent Comey memo) “eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message.” Meanwhile, politically connected and high-level government officials continue to leak without consequence, or selectively declassify material to advance their own interests.
Join Courage to Resist and a dozen other organizations in calling on President Trump, who has acknowledged Winner’s treatment as “so unfair,” to pardon Reality Winner or to commute her sentence to time served.
Feds holding last public hearing on draft registration Los Angeles, California Thursday, September 20 At California State University Los Angeles More info
50th anniversary events of the Presidio 27 mutiny San Francisco, California Panel discussion on Saturday, October 13 Commemoration on Sunday, October 14 At the former Presidio Army Base More info
In The Matter Of 1950s
Rock And Roll Legend One Ricky Nelson (1940-1985)-Yeah, “Poor Little Fool”
By Sam Lowell
You never know what idea
will germinate in your head when you need to find a subject to write about
after “the boss,” site manager Greg Green, tells you to find some “freaking”
thing to write about since I had not written anything in a while (that “freaking”
only a for public consumption but gives you the drift of what he really said).
Then, as if by magic, an idea came to me as I was driving up to Olde Saco in Maine
to see my old friend and comrade Josh Breslin, who also has been remiss about
assignments lately but apparently has a golden shield to protect him from Greg’s
wrath. Most of the way up U.S. 95 until you hit about Hampton in New Hampshire
the local NPR station will get you
through the time. Then the signal dies out and for a few minutes you get a mix
of that station and another coming out of the University of Southern Maine in Portland.
This college station, like all such operations, is really an amateur operation.
I remember one time previously the amateur DJ apologized for the quality of his
home-made tape which went awry but something had happened to the machine. I
yelled out to myself as I was driving along “what the hell this is beautiful.”
On the day that I was heading to Josh’s though I was given a chestnut since the
DJ that day was playing for some reason I never fully understood because I arrived
at Josh’s before the set was over a raft of Rickey Nelson songs from the 1950s.
Of course the 1950s was the now classic age of rock and roll
and the time when I came of musical age, began seriously listening to the radio,
the rock and roll radio where Mr. Nelson had a number of hits starting with Poor Little Foolwhich was
one of the songs in the set the DJ played that day. I am dating myself, but it
cannot be helped I was as likely to watch Rickey as part of the Nelson family
on television on the Ozzie and Harriet
Show. There he played the younger brother of two of what was supposed to be
a model television family for 1950s emulation. A family where all the so-called
problems they faced, that were the subject of the program were resolved without
trouble by the end of the half hour. As it turned out Ricky also had musical
talent and so that is where I want to place the blame.
Yes, place
the blame and some fifty plus years I am still ticked off about it. See not
only was Ricky on television and out on tour singing his ass off but he was a
very good looking 1950s-style suburban boy. In short, a guy girls, suburban
girls and Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where I grew up girls thought
was “cute.” And that is where the bone I have to pick with Mr. Nelson, or his
memory, starts. Starts with one Teresa Green who was in my class in elementary school
and who I had a serious crush on (funny, old-fashioned term isn’t it). And who
I tried to take to about seven church or school dances but who would not give
me the time of day for one very specific reason. She was “saving herself” not
her expression but that was the idea for Ricky Nelson.
That was the
start and many grievous nights for a few weeks after until I took Linda Pratt
to the school dance I moped about the lost of Teresa and the burning hatred I
had for Ricky despite liking some of his songs. Adding insult to injury though
when I got back home, I mentioned to my long-time companion, Laura Perkins who
writes here occasionally, by the way that is by mutual consent the way we like
to speak of our relationship after a combined five divorces, I mentioned hearing
Ricky Nelson on the radio on the way to Maine. Suddenly she got swoony, got
giddy and told me that she had had a serious crush on Mr. Nelson when she was
young. Thought he was cute. Then I mentioned old elementary school flame Teresa
and her “saving herself” for Ricky. Laura then said if I had known her then and
had asked her for a date she too would probably have said she was “saving herself”
for that bastard Ricky. So you can see why I am seeing red when the name Ricky
Nelson comes up now.
